


CASE 985

by DannieU



Series: Parallel [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Alpha, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Attempt at Humor, Darcy Lewis just wants a baby sister goddamnit, Gen, M/M, Mating Bites, Mating Bond, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mpreg, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, POV Outsider, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Underage Sex, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, past dub-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:16:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DannieU/pseuds/DannieU
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy was doing pretty well for herself, she liked to think. Excecpt then Captain America blew up S.H.I.E.L.D., and suddenly she's being pulled in for secret missions to save Hawkeye, getting kidnapped, spending an unhealthy amount of time with Tony Stark and receiving care packages from the Winter Soldier. How the hell is this her life? Also, Tony is so right. No man should ever wear eyeliner unironically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, I tend to think that every writer needs a bit of levity every once in a while to stay balanced while most of their stories are utter angst fests. I know I do. That's why this. This is a cracky premise written as semi-serious humor (if that even makes sense to begin with). This is my thing where I sit in front of the computer and giggle and snicker and get completely, utterly relaxed in between the feels of 914. Figured I might as well share it, even if not everyone will probably find it as fun as I do.
> 
> Thanks so much to Potrix for the quick, thoughtful beta. Made me smile so much with that. And that said, all remaining mistakes are my own. There's some skipping back and forth in time here, as well as some scenes being very much stream of conscious, which means that keeping track of tenses was hell in a nutshell. If you catch any remaining mistakes, they're my own, and please don't hesitate to let me know.
> 
> Assume the rules of the universe are the same here as they are in 914. Tags will probably be updated as we go along (definitely will, since I'm pretty sure I forgot a few), and future chapters might very well be a 'bit' shorter.
> 
> Thanks for reading through that hell of a writer's note. Hopefully, I didn't turn you off completely.

Darcy has always wanted a little sister. Okay, _always_ is probably a bit of an exaggeration, more like, God, since she was in preschool. She thinks she became aware of it during the summer before she turned four, when she realized that somehow over the past year or so, the stork express had provided every single one of her friends who didn't already have siblings with a shiny new baby. Some of the ones who had siblings too, damn them and their greedy, grabby hands, some people would've been fine with _one_.

The wish solidified one Saturday afternoon when she'd been playing with Ashley in the park for hours before following her home, drawn by the promise of cookies and milk. When they walked into Ashley's house she didn't, like a sane person, make a beeline for the kitchen, but rather kicked off her shoes and sprinted up the stairs. Darcy caught up to her when she entered the nursery and peeked into the crib. Baby Hayley peeked back up, eyes ridiculously big and ridiculously blue, a tiny clump of blond hair crowning the top of her head. 

"Hi," Ashley said, and Hayley babbled and waved her tiny fists hard enough to move her whole body. Ashley grinned like she'd finally managed to find the end of the rainbow, which they'd been trying to do for years now. She leaned down and stroked a chubby cheek, and then she finally headed for the kitchen, Darcy still on her heels. "Isn't she a-dor-a-ble?" Ashley asked, pronouncing the word slowly and carefully, as if it was new to her. It probably was. Ashley, despite being nearly five already, didn't have the best verbal skills, unlike Darcy who'd been playing the thesaurus wherever she went since she was two.

Darcy shrugged, noncommittal. "She seems kind of boring," she said, although, okay, the babbling had been kind of cute. "Is that all she does? Lie around and wriggle a bit?"

Ashley returned her shrug, the look on her face at once slightly hurt and utterly eager to get her point across. "Well, she's still real little," she said. "Mom says it won't be long before she can play with me, and then I'll always have someone to play with me, and keep all my secrets, and love me forever and ever."

And okay, even at three and more than three quarters (Darcy _knows_ this for a fact, because she remembers the measuring tape she and Mom cut a section off each day, counting down to her birthday in September), Darcy had to admit that sounded kind of nice. She always had to make an effort to either get someone to come to her house, or ask her parents to go to theirs, if she wanted someone to play with. And while her parents were awesome, having another girl around to play with, who'd keep her secrets and always love her would be even awesomer. And that was pretty much when the wish had started.

A couple of weeks later, Darcy started preschool and made a ton of new friends, and way too many of them had kid siblings too which, well, life just wasn't fair, was it? It was lunchtime and Darcy was munching on Joey Larson's cookie, which she'd managed to trade her own healthy snack for (a few years later, she'd be old enough to understand the concept of hippie parents, and also that it was the most annoying aspect of her otherwise mostly perfect folks. Also that she was damn good at talking and could wrap nearly anyone around her little finger). Melissa Monaghan was regaling the whole table with the story of how she'd dressed her baby sister up like a fucking doll and the kid had then been nice enough to take her first steps, resulting in ice cream and everlasting pride for Melissa. Darcy stuck up her chin, imperious. She might not know that much about dynamics yet, but she was alpha, damnit, and she could arrest the attention of the whole tableful of kids while hardly trying.

Darcy had never liked Melissa. They'd had a play date once, and Melissa had stepped on Darcy's model airplane. Which could've been all right. Darcy wasn't mean. It had been an accident, that much was obvious. But then Melissa had opened her damn mouth and, "Well, the thing sucked anyway," she’d said. "The wings are upside down. And you're a _girl_. You should play with _dolls_." 

There were several things about that that had set Darcy right off. First, the implication that she _had_ to play with dolls, which, whenever she'd tried, had bored the living fuck out of her, and her parents had supported her in her decision to shun all things pink and frilly very early on in her life. Second, as she loudly informed Melissa, she'd put the wings upside down on purpose because it would reduce drag. And okay, that had just been some kind of vague and probably very stupid idea she'd had while gluing the thing together, but what did Melissa know about that? The whole thing ended up in a fight. Melissa tried to scratch and pull hair, and Darcy punched and restrained and straddled until Melissa was howling up a storm and Darcy had to be pulled off and Melissa's mom screamed at Darcy's parents to 'keep the little bitch in check'. Later that night, Dad had made jokes about super strength, cheering her right back up. Needless to say, there had been no more play dates with Melissa after that. 

So maybe it was that old anger and indignation, maybe it was Darcy's own growing wish and looming pride, maybe it was just a kid's stupid recklessness. Either way, she used the quiet she'd caused at her table to stand up and say, "I'm going to have a baby sister too."

For a moment, the whole table was silent. Some of the other kids nodded and looked excited, and Darcy felt a burst of warmth go through her. Then Melissa burst out laughing, bright and mean and enough to make Darcy's teeth ache. "No you're not," she said. "Your parents are old, my mom said so. She said to my dad, 'poor Darcy Lewis. Her parents are the same age as my mother. I doubt they can even get down on the floor to play with her. And _that_ kid, at _their_ age. Horrible way to go into retirement.'" It was the first time, but wouldn't be the last, that Melissa's perfect memory set Darcy off.

The thing was, she wasn't right at all. Darcy had the best parents. Dad cooked the best meals and Mom read the best books and their silver hair was _beautiful_ , and Dad got down on the floor to play with her every night, with old train sets and radio controlled cars, and Mom would spend hours helping her put her next Star Wars model together. Her parents weren't old, they were just right. 

"Take that back," Darcy screamed, and, of course, Melissa didn't, and within moments they were rolling around on the floor, Darcy throwing punches while Melissa pulled out chunks of her hair. The teachers pulled them apart soon enough, and Melissa broke into perfect crocodile tears while Darcy folded her arms across her chest and began to think out her revenge while Miss James scolded her and Miss Cameron consoled Melissa and Mrs. Jones called Darcy's parents.

Darcy supposed she was lucky that her parents knew Melissa, because they asked no questions, simply spoke to the teachers, took her home and rubbed their cheeks against hers and agreed with her on how horrible, horrible a dumb little beta Melissa was. Two days later, at dinner, Darcy got up on her chair, happy and hopeful and utterly confident as she stared imperiously at her parents. "I want a little sister," she said.

The look her parents exchanged was so sad that with a few more years of experience and maturity, looking back at it damn near broke Darcy’s heart. She picked up enough of their scents to know the answer before it had even been given, and she was mulish by the time Dad opened his mouth. "It's not that we don't want to, Honey," he said. "We'd fill this house up with pups if we could. But we can't."

Darcy, always all too capable of holding onto feelings, whether they were grudges or crushes or something else entirely, took years to forgive them.

When she was eight and had just had her first preliminary alpha sex ed class, they slowly, carefully, explained to her that they were simply too old, that Mom's heats were long past, that there was nothing they could do. She was older now, more perceptive. She knew that their silver hair, which she still loved, meant they were older than everyone else's parents, closer to grandparent age, more frail than the other adults she knew. Darcy slowly began to forgive them.

She was eleven when she wondered out loud why, if they had wanted more kids, they hadn't just had one immediately after her, because obviously it had still been possible at some point. A couple months later they sat her down for The Talk. "Darcy, Honey," Dad said. "I want you to know that nothing we tell you tonight changes anything. We're your parents, we always will be. We will never stop loving you."

Darcy frowned, looked back and forth between them. "Are you dying?" she asked, because Billy's dad had died of something or other just a year ago, and he hadn't been nearly as old as Darcy's parents.

Her parents exchanged another sad, horrified look. Finally, Mom reached out, took Darcy's hands in her own and squeezed. "Of course not," she said, voice unaccountably soft. She reached out, pushed a lock of Darcy's thick, dark hair behind her ear. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the dark color of her own hair confused her. She'd seen pictures of her parents before their hair faded to grey. Mom had been blonde and Dad a light honey brown, where Darcy's hair had always been just a few shades away from black. They were both pale where her skin was a light olive that went dark gold after just a few days in the sun. Mom had blue eyes and Dad had green and Darcy had grey ones in some lights and browns in others, and she was pretty sure her biology teacher had laughed at her when she'd told him that. All of these things connected in Darcy's head, faster than she could keep track, faster than she could really, truly make sense of, and yet, somehow, she wasn't surprised when Mom continued, "You're adopted."

Still, her reaction was visceral. They were _hers_ and she was theirs and she had no idea what to do with any evidence to the contrary. "No," she choked out, strangled, torn between the niggling feeling that she'd known all along and the utter denial of anything that might put distance between them.

Mom's hand caught hers again, squeezing tight, and Dad had tears in his eyes. "We were both," he said, and he was choking up too, more uncertain than she'd ever seen him. "We both wanted our education." Her parents were smart, she knew. They were both doctors, and not the medical kind either, and Darcy was old enough to know that getting PhDs took its time. "Then the alpha civil rights movement began," he continued. "We were both part of it. That's how we met. We bonded in sixty-three."

"Maria Carbonell was at the acknowledging ceremony," Mom said, and her voice was suddenly damn near dreamy, about the way Darcy imagined she might've sounded if she'd got to meet 'N Sync up close and personal. "It was magical. It was just... It was still the dark ages, and Maria Carbonell was still just a teenager fresh from Spain, fifteen maybe, and none of us knew the kind of difference she was going to make, or whether we might ever make it very far at all, but we all had hope that day." Darcy vaguely remembered hearing the name somewhere before, but she couldn't quite connect it to anything tangible. "We were going to name you Maria, you know," Mom added. "But you were born less than a year after she died. Every alpha bitch in America - Spain too, I'm guessing - named their daughter Maria that year, and Maria would've scoffed at that, would've told us to keep going against the grain--"

Dad cleared his throat. " _Anyway_ ," he said, but it was said so fondly that all it did was make Mom smile. "We bonded, and we spent the next fifteen years fighting for what we knew was right, fighting for a future for all American alphas."

"I still remember when Maria had her son," Mom interjected. "She was passing his picture around everywhere. It made everything so tangible, so much more than it had ever been before. I still don't understand why he doesn't use 'Carbonell'."

"Too political for a military contractor, I assume," Dad said, pulling the explanation seamlessly back on track all over again in that way he had. "Anyway, we didn't feel like the change had been pushed enough for us to pull back and settle down until the late seventies. By then, we weren't exactly spring chickens anymore. Your mother still had heats, so maybe it wasn't age, but something else. Just..." He paused a moment, shook his head. "However much we wanted a pup, it never happened. In eighty-two, we applied to adopt, but it was difficult for an alpha pair. Still is, to be honest. Some laws could still use a bit of a makeover."

"Thing is," Mom interjected, and for once she seemed on subject. "An all alpha pair can only adopt an alpha pup, and the number of alpha pups put up for adoption..." She trailed off for a moment, grimacing. "I may not have quite experienced it myself, but I've had enough friends tell me. The moment a pup is born, you go into the denning haze, and you don't come out for months. By the time you're yourself again, you're so deeply bonded that giving up that pup is a more painful thought than giving up a limb. Alpha survival instinct." She gave a small shrug. "So obviously, whether they're ready or equipped or not, hardly any alpha bitch gives a pup up for adoption, never mind the fact that abortion just isn't possible."

Dad was the one to go off track this time. "Always use protection," he said. "If you get yourself knotted up, that's pretty much that."

Darcy felt her cheeks heat up. "Da-ad," she protested.

"Either way," Mom said. "We never had much hope. But then, in September of eighty-nine, we got a call from the adoption agency. They told us a newborn alpha pup had been discovered outside a fire station in New York City, just a few hours old, going into shock at the loss of her mother, that she needed someone who could be there in two hours flat and who'd be willing to give up everything for the next however many months."

"We'd given up on the idea of ever having pups," Dad said. "We were in our fifties. It wasn't physically possible anymore, and adoption was a long shot from the start, and then we got that call. We made it up there immediately, and we weren't even sure they'd let us keep you after the denning haze, but there was this tiny, helpless alpha pup who needed us, and however much it might end up hurting, we weren't going to say no. So we picked you up and took you home, made our best attempt at a den."

"I actually managed to enter the haze," Mom said. "I shouldn't have been able to, at my age, but you were just that perfect."

"By the time you and Mom were settled," Dad said. "The authorities had accepted the fact that taking you away would do everyone more harm than good. But you... It was never that we didn't want you to have siblings, Honey. It was never that we wanted to make you lonely or make things difficult for you. It's just..."

As always, Mom completed his sentence, "You are our one in a million, the one chance we never thought we'd have. We were never going to have that twice, no matter how much we might've liked it. And you might say we wasted our youth and squandered away our chances, that once upon a time we might've had pups that were biologically ours, but..." She paused, swallowed, leaned in to rub her cheek against Darcy's again. "I can't regret any of the work we did during the alpha rights movement. And I look at you, and I know we made the right choice, that somehow, despite everything, we got to have it all."

And Darcy loved them, loved them so much it hurt. Slowly, so slowly, she began to put the dream of a little sister aside.

Okay, so if someone pressed her and pushed her and didn't let up, she might admit that as a teenager she'd had an imaginary friend whose name had been Maria and who'd been her little sister, someone to talk to when things got tough, when the betas got fucking annoying and her heats, before she was old enough for suppressants, damn near agonizing, someone who told her, when everyone else told her she was worthless and apart, that she was amazing and strong and wonderful. Maria's phantom voice got her through high school, helped her graduate at sixteen. 

Her Mom passed away from cancer just a few months later, and Darcy stayed home with her dad for a year, working odd jobs for as long as she could keep them as she tried to sort out what she was going to do with herself now. She half wanted to be an engineer, but every guidance councilor she'd ever had had told her to give up that dream. Her mind worked along too many strange, different routes. She had an easy grasp of the mathematics necessary, but whenever she found what she thought was a great way to apply them, she was shot down. She was too intuitive, not logical enough, her ideas too outlandish, her mind too prone to strange jumps. Eventually, she accepted that they were right and applied for political sciences at Culver University. If nothing else, she could spend her life fighting for her parents' causes. That should be fulfilling enough. She got in without a hitch, and then her dad's health deteriorated too, cracked by bond-loss and old age, and she was going back and forth constantly, and kept trying to make herself interested in her subject, and even though she managed to skip a year, she was still in desperate need of extra credits to move her post-graduate along. She applied for everything and anything, and eventually, around the time Dad went into a nursing home, Jane Foster, fucking physical something something something or other, was the only one who'd have her. Darcy didn't have much of a choice, did she?

And the rest, as they say, is history. History full of chasing storms and tazing demi-Gods and witnessing things she had never believed possible, sure, but history nonetheless.

And somehow, even with all that behind her, now, as she is about to die, all she can think is, _I never got to have a baby sister_. She is an adult. She is twenty-fucking-four years old. She has an income, has several diplomas to her name, has been all over the world and seen things most people would never ever even believe. And she has never felt more like a child than she does right now, staring death in the eye and remembering her old dream and realizing she's never really buried it. She is going to die, and she's never got to be a big sister.

***

So, the story of how she got to where she is exactly is probably not, you know, immediately obvious, and ever since Maria, Darcy has had the truly annoying habit of narrating everything inside the confines of her own mind. She suspects, but will never admit, that it's mostly to keep everything making sense to herself because her life has become such a damn confusing ball of confusing-ness, and anyone would need a damn coping mechanism. It's got to be a thing. She'll have to ask around at some point or other, preferably when Thor's brought down the Asgardian liquor and everyone's drunk out of their skulls. Anyway, dying is supposed to come with this whole white tunnel and reliving your whole damn life, and there's no white tunnel and no awesome voice narrating her life - she's kind of been holding out hope for the guy from _Honest Trailers_ for that job - and God damn it, why does a girl have to do everything her fucking self?

S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. That's a thing that happened, as impossible as that might've seemed back when fucking Coulson showed up to confiscate all of Jane's notes and stuff. Still, as larger than life as they used to be, they fell. It was barely five hours later when a Stark Industries private plane touched down in London and Jane's cell beeped and Tony fucking Stark himself told them to go straight to the SI private airstrip in London City Airport and get on the plane, they were compromised and HYDRA might be coming for them at any second. Needless to say, Darcy took less than two minutes to throw her belongings into her suitcase and sat on it hard enough to zip it shut before joining Jane and grabbing the bag of scientific equipment because, well, Darcy might not be tall, but Jane was so fucking tiny only a little person would not offer to carry some of her stuff. Even that was probably debatable.

They touched down in New York a few hours later, and there was a car waiting for them, and before Darcy even knew what was up and down, had even acclimated to being back State-side, she was being showed to one of Stark Tower's guest rooms, and she was fucking exhausted, and the bed looked magnificent, so Darcy let herself collapse into it and slept for the better part of twelve hours.

Jane shook her awake eventually and pulled her out into the common area without even giving her the dignity of letting her get dressed. Not that Darcy cared, really. Her sweatpants and - she looked down - Iron Maiden t-shirt left her fully dressed, no problem. They entered the Avengers' lounge, and there was Tony Stark himself, except it was no version of Tony Stark Darcy had ever seen before. He was wearing jeans worn to shreds and a dirty black wife beater, his hair was sticking on end and he had bags under his eyes like he hadn't slept for days. 

"Nice rags," he told Darcy when they stepped into view before raking his hand through his hair again. Neither she nor Jane said anything, the both of them waiting for their host to go on. Stark gripped his hair, tugged on it sharply. Darcy had the strange momentary notion that the faint silver at his temples was actually growing in brown, like he was younger than he wanted anyone to know. "So, er," he said. "S.H.I.E.L.D. has fallen. That's a thing now. And God knows that even when I was spewing nonsense about privatizing world peace, I wasn't imagining running a damn intelligence agency. But, I kind of have a vested interest in keeping the world in one piece, and..." He shrugged, uncertain. "Selvig should be here in a few hours. I'm pulling as many scientists in for protection as I can. And, er..."

"Thanks," Jane said, and then she was rushing in and hugging Stark around the neck and Stark didn't seem to know what the hell to do with her, simply patting her back awkwardly while trying to extricate himself. "Thank you so much. The thought of HYDRA getting to Erik..."

"Well," Stark said. He shrugged. "Seemed like he'd be a boon for our side and all." He cleared his throat. "Anyway," he said. "We don't exactly have the UN go-ahead yet, so we have to be careful, but--"

"I'm not an agent," Jane said. "You have to know that. I can't--"

"No worries," Tony said, shrugging again even as he cut her off like her protest was nothing. Which, Darcy couldn't help but think, probably meant that was what he'd planned all along. The scent and even the sheer impression of Stark was that of intelligence so sharp it could cut you if you stepped wrong, even with his pretty face and wide eyes to temper it all. "I need you down in the lab anyway," he continued, confirming Darcy's suspicions. "Need you to work with Bruce on finding a way to open the Bifrost or at the very least finding some way to let Thor know everything's gone to shit down here."

Jane gave a sharp nod. "Yeah," she said. "Sure, I can do that."

"Also," Stark added. "I'm trying to extricate trusted deep cover operatives, except there's really only one I trust enough after this whole circus to try to extricate."

Darcy felt her eyes widen. "Hawkeye," she said.

Stark cocked an eyebrow.

Darcy shrugged. "It's pretty obvious, really," she said. "Only deep cover operatives you'd trust after this whole thing is your own team, and Black Widow was spotted in D.C. No other spies on your team. So what do you need our help for?"

"Apparently, thanks to good old Obie, I've got more weapons floating around on the black market than I realized. A worrying number of them have been tracked back to San Luis, Argentina. Apparently, Fury didn't like that anymore than I did. According to the documents I picked up before they went online, he sent Katniss there to investigate," Stark said. "Doesn't help that the area's a known hotspot for post WWII German immigrants. What with everything else that's been happening..." He grimaced. "We need to get him the fuck out of there."

Darcy grimaced sympathetically. She liked Hawkeye. She fucking wished she could shoot like that. Honestly, she wished she could do anything any one of the Avengers could do even half as well. A quarter as well. A fucking tenth, and she'd be satisfied. The idea of one of the Avengers being caught in some after-effect of Nazi Germany didn't sit well with her. "Anything I can do?" she asked.

Stark let out a breath. "Luckily," he said, "I've got a factory in the area. Thanks very much, Stane." He paused. "He was trying to outsource," he explained. "It fucking sucks and I'm still trying to clean up his mess." Something about his defensiveness was oddly childlike and wholly endearing, and Darcy felt more at ease than she had since seeing the stripper poles on the private plane and wondering if she would be herded up there. "Anyway, the good thing is that I've got pretty unlimited access to the area. I could use some backup, though. I hear you're pretty handy with a taser, and I might need a second pair of eyes I can send off every once in a while while I play the distraction."

Darcy winced. "I don't suck," she conceded. "But your team. Why not bring one of them?"

Stark sighed loudly, full of annoyance. "Cap's playing hide-and-go-seek with his amnesiac best friend. Who knows where. Last signal I caught was in Peru about a day ago. Widow is with him. Thor's off-world. Bruce is even worse at dark ops than I am. Barton's the one who needs extraction. I can't get to Hill or Coulson fast enough. That leaves, well, me." He gave a shrug that was probably supposed to be humorously self-deprecating but came off self-conscious and uncertain. "Just, I could use a PA for the cover and someone who can use any sort of weapon halfway decently." He paused a moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing on a swallow that should be hot as hell but just made something in the pit of Darcy's stomach clench with the knowledge that she was never going to be able to say no to this man, and she may never even figure out a good reason why that was.

"Sure," she said, well aware that she sounded just as uncertain and self-doubting as him, but fucking hey, he'd been a superhero for six fucking years, cut her some slack for being scared of a shared op when all she'd ever been'd been Jane Foster's assistant. "What do you need me to do?"

***

It was still the height of the dry season when the private plane touched down on the airstrip Stark Industries apparently owned in San Luis. The mountains rose up around the city, dry and clay-red, and sure, Darcy wasn't usually the type to notice these kinds of things at all, but hey, it was damn gorgeous. It all took the backseat almost immediately, though, and then she was watching, shifting uncomfortably in her pantsuit (they'd stopped by Stark's tailor, who'd tutted at her cup size but expressed relief that at least he was used to working with her colors, and had whipped something up in two hours flat), as Stark stepped forwards and exchanged cheek kisses with some local dignitary or other. They were both speaking within moments, and all Darcy could do was discreetly put the StarkPad she held into recording mode. She barely knew twenty words of Spanish, and there was no way in hell she was following their conversation without help. Stark, on the other hand, only seemed to speak it faster, lispier and more accented than even the locals could manage. Somewhere in the very back of Darcy’s mind, her brain made the connection to all her parents' old stories of Maria (Marìa) Carbonell. Of course he'd speak Spanish like a native. He very nearly was one.

The rest of the day passed in a flurry of three lunches and four dinners and countless meetings, and Darcy kept surreptitiously recording everything while pretending to tap away at the tablet. It was for her own sake far more than Stark's. She didn't doubt his eidetic memory for a second, but she was looking forward to seeing the JARVIS-translated transcripts. The whole PA thing might be just a cover, but she'd much prefer to actually know what was going on.

Eventually, at some point past midnight, some dignitary's car took them to a ranch a few miles outside the city limits. Darcy cocked an eyebrow at Stark in question.

He let out a disinterested breath."It's Carbonell property," he said. "Not Stark. My great grandmother immigrated for a bit, set up shop here. Then she changed her mind and moved back, never sold the property. My abuelo fixed it all up, but that was all way back in the sixties and seventies, of course, so prepare for a blast from the past."

Despite Stark's words, the ranch, or at least the rooms he'd led her to, were more than comfortable and fairly up to date. It even came with JARVIS installed, but then she was starting to doubt that any property Stark owned came without that feature. When she'd had about enough time to shower, change into her pajamas and settle into bed with the tablet, there was a knock to the door. "It's open," she called, and Stark walked right in, wearing a pair of sweats and a worn band t-shirt. "Learn anything new, then?" she asked, pausing the translated playback of the second Spanish conversation of the day.

Stark sighed and sank into the chair in the corner of the room. "Apparently the local government seized control of a couple of the production lines of the factory a few months back," he said. "Somehow they managed to do that without alerting me or the home office, and I do not like that one bit." He paused a moment. "My best guess, Stane left a few schematics behind, fuck knows whether by accident or design. Either way, I'm thinking they're getting additional Stark weapons straight from the source."

Darcy winced. "That's not good," she said. "You think Hawkeye found that out before he went off the map?"

Stark shrugged. "Probably," he said. He stopped for a moment, licked his lips, and Darcy was kind of shocked by how she found that not a bit attractive. She had nothing against older men, and Stark was exactly the right kind, forties and (theoretically) wise and distinguished while looking barely thirty, yet just physically mature enough to be out of the weird-face-too-big-eyes phase she knew from all sorts of magazine covers he'd gone through. "As much as I liked to pretend otherwise," Stark added, "Clint's not exactly an idiot."

"So," Darcy said, and she was kind of surprised by how easily she was deferring to him. It never happened this easily with Jane. It never happened this easily with anyone. And sure, he was an older alpha, but she tended to have some trouble with those as well. "What's the next step going to be here?"

Stark was silent for a moment. Then he sighed, sounding suddenly utterly exhausted. "Not sure yet," he said. "Part of me wants nothing more than to get to the factory, find out what the hell they're doing there. The rest of me is all too aware that they'd have to be idiots to keep Barton and weapons production in the same place. We'd have to look for him somewhere else. And since he's the priority..." His Adam’s apple bobbed on a swallow and for a brief second he looked downright uncomfortable. "We can always come back for the factory, I guess."

Darcy sucked in a breath that was half anticipation laced through with fear, and half a foreign eagerness to please. "Or we could split up," she suggested. "One of us goes after Hawkeye. The other one scopes out the factory."

Stark grimaced.

"Come on," Darcy said. "It's totally doable. You go after Hawkeye. I'll go to the factory. Just give me the specs, show me exactly what they aren't supposed to be producing. I'm not dumb, you know. And if it isn't something I can stop, give me some explosives and I'll blow the whole damn thing sky-high."

"While that does sound tempting," Stark allowed. "I didn't bring any explosives beyond what Iron Man carries. Getting Iron Man past customs was enough of a pain in the ass. I'd have had no chance in hell of getting anything else into the country."

"How did you plan on getting Hawkeye, then?" Darcy asked.

Stark shrugged. "Iron Man," he said simply, and okay, that was a pretty good point, Darcy could admit that.

"Okay," she said. "So, you do that. But we wait until morning. You find the most likely building, suit up, bust him out. I'll go into the factory as your PA. I have access, right? Anyway, if you give me the specs, I'll scope the place out. Maybe I'll even work as a distraction. We meet back up at the plane and jet it the hell out once you've got Hawkeye, and I'll tell you what I found. Coulson or someone can come pick up the mess after, right?"

Stark opened his mouth, then shut it. For a moment, he looked incredibly uncertain, and then that shifted into hesitant and then something she couldn't read at all. He shook his head sharply. "No way in hell am I going to send you into what might currently be a Nazi fabrication unit with just a taser for protection," he decided at last.

Darcy rolled her eyes. "You forget the part where I tased _Thor_?"

Stark grimaced, shook his head again. He looked confused now, though. "No," he said. "No. I can't... You can't do that. I can't." He stopped, blinked. "The fuck?"

Darcy opened her mouth to respond somehow, except suddenly a loud crashing sound pierced her ears and bright lights enveloped her vision and _fuck_ , but the fucking _house_ was exploding around them, and how the fuck, on top of everything, did that even get to be a thing that actually happened?

The floor gave out beneath her feet and for long moments, she was free-falling. Then something clashed in around her, solid and tight like a fucking metal coffin. Her panic grew, left her gasping and shaking and fuck, she'd been around Thor enough that she should be beyond panicking over a measly explosion, except she obviously wasn't and fuck, fuck, what the hell was even going on?

It wasn't a coffin, Darcy realized when her mind had cleared just enough to let anything but dopamine and panic through. Sure, it was as heavy and constricting as one, except it moved when she did, followed orders more quickly than she could think them up. "What the hell?" she muttered, and then she realized her eyes were shut. She snapped them open immediately, took in the sight that met her. The world was somehow sharper than even her normal vision could make it, overlaid, oddly, with numbers and statistics. A voice was speaking in her ear, she realized, and what the fucking fuck was that all about anyway? "JARVIS?" she asked uncertainly.

"Yes, Miss?"

"I'm in the suit," Darcy breathed. "How the hell am I in the suit." Then she swallowed, took in the inferno all around her. She wasn't fool enough to think she could fly this thing on her own, so, "JARVIS," and so sue her if her voice was a bit hesitant. She wasn't used to dealing with AIs. "Autopilot. Get Stark and get us out of here."

"Certainly, Miss," JARVIS said, and if Darcy hadn't known better she'd have said he sounded almost proud. Then she didn't have time to think at all, was too absorbed by the information passing along the Heads Up Display, distracted by the flames and smoke, and the sudden weight and imbalance as the suit picked up a second human being to cart around.

***

They touched down on a mountainside, still within view of the city but hidden behind an outcropping of rock. Darcy was on her ass, shifting endlessly in an attempt to make the suit halfway comfortable, not that it was working. It clearly wasn't engineered for her cleavage. Next to her, Stark was sitting cross-legged with the helmet in his hands, talking to it like a fucking crazy person.

"How the hell did this even happen, JARV?" he was asking. "How the-- This suit is supposed to respond to--"

"Elevated heartbeat and dopamine, Sir," JARVIS interjected, voice coming right out of the helmet and yeah, okay, that did make Stark seem a whole lot less crazy.

"--DNA," Stark continued. "It's supposed to be coded to a total of three people. Me, Pepper and Rhodey. How the _fuck_ is Lewis wearing the suit? How did it even assemble around her without a command? Can you tell me how the fuck that is possible?"

"I'm sorry," Darcy said. "I didn't mean to. I don't even know what happened. One second, bomb went off, next second, I'm fucking Iron Man, and I am as surprised as--"

"Seriously, JAY, darling," Stark continued. "How the fucking _fuck_?"

"As anyone," Darcy continued, despite the sudden difficulty in continuing. "I didn't mean to hijack it or anything. I just--"

"Sir," JARVIS said, "You are correct that this model is designed to respond to DNA. On very loose perimeters." And with that, his voice shifted into an exact copy of Stark's. "'Just make sure it's not too limited, JARV. With how fucked up the world's suddenly gotten, narrowing it down to the exact DNA is just a recipe for disaster. Loki and his little stick of destiny could show up right now and according to Thor he could turn my Y into another X in two seconds flat, and that's without counting the kind of change all the other assholes can bring. So keep it as loose as you can while keeping it as closely restricted to us as possible, hey JARV?'"

"You're an asshole," Stark said. "I don't remember writing this amount of assholerey into your code."

"--I just panicked," Darcy went on, choppily. "I'm not even sure what happened. I just. God. How the hell am I even wearing this? I can't fucking breathe."

"Sir," JARVIS said. "With the perimeters set, there are three known users, namely Colonel Rhodes, Ms. Potts and yourself. However, there could be any amount of unknown authorized users. Anyone with a genetic sequence close enough to any three of you would be--"

"Just get to the fucking point, JAY," Stark snapped.

"If you set this up to work for Ms. Potts as well, you might want to consider making room for actual breasts in here," Darcy commented, though she was pretty certain no one was actually listening to her.

"Basically," JARVIS said, "Given the loose parameters, anyone related closely enough to either of the three recognized users to share enough DNA could make the armor respond. Of course, given the limited amount of family all three users have, this wasn't theoretically a big issue, but--"

"But what, JAY?" Stark bit out. "The damn point, right the fuck now."

"It's like I'm not even here," Darcy said, shifting in the armor once more.

"Ms. Lewis has accessed the HUD on your DNA codings," JARVIS said at last.

Stark let out a string of Spanish words, most likely curses. 'Joder', at least, Darcy was pretty sure she recognized. "How close a relation does it take to breach the parameters, because I really don't have a whole lot of close ones left?"

"Very close ones," JARVIS said.

" _Fuck_ ," Stark said, emphatically enough to make Darcy wince. He turned to her slowly. "Well, I guess that either means Howard was more or a bastard than I ever knew and you're my half sister, or..." He paused, winced. "What's your birthday?"

"September sixth, nineteen-eighty-nine," Darcy answered automatically, still somehow incapable of not answering a direct order or question from Stark, and oddly close to preening at the sensation of having his focus back on her.

" _Fuck_ ," Stark said. "Fuckfuckfuck _fuck_." Then his eyes focused somewhere behind her, widened. " _Fuck_. JAY, I'm going to need that armor back immediamente."

Before Darcy could so much as react, the metal encasing fled her body and enveloped Stark instead, turning him straight back into the all too iconic Iron Man.

***

"So," Stark said, faceplate up as he stared at their captor, all steely gaze and suddenly none of the vulnerability Darcy had seen since the moment they met was shining through. "My guess is you want a top-notch engineer on your team."

The officer - that must be what he was, not that Darcy had much of a clue about the military at fucking all - simply cocked an eyebrow in answer. "Indeed," he said. "Proper engineers are few and far between. Sadly, our great organization has gone without since the death of Zola."

Stark's eyes, despite the seriousness of the situation, were sparkling when they met hers. Darcy felt herself snickering before she could quite bite it back. "Sorry," Darcy heard herself say, suddenly unaccountably certain she was speaking for the both of them. "I thought I just heard you saying you've been staying chaste for forty fucking years, which I'm pretty sure is more years than you've lived. Sure's a hell more than I have. Seriously, how do you find new recruits for this whole thing in the first place?" Another snicker made it past her lips. "You've all seriously been living like monks since the seventies?"

Apparently, HYDRA didn't have the sense of humor to match the combination of Lewis and Stark, which would've been awesome except the whole thing apparently landed them solidly in a dreary fucking jail cell. To make matters worse, it took the first three days to convince Stark that it wasn't a cave and no one was about to start water boarding him, and fuck, even Darcy was soft enough that that whole thing got to her, the way Stark would wake up screaming from nightmares, the way he would wrap around his own chest, trying in vain to protect something that was no longer there. Even after he was more aware of his surroundings, it took barely a day and the threat of a tub full of dirty water. It broke her fucking heart, and by the time he gave, she wasn't just sympathetic to his choice, she fucking well agreed with it. Half an hour later, they were showed to a workshop.

Stark spent the first few hours pacing the space so furiously Darcy was half certain he'd wear an actual fucking groove in the floor. Finally he calmed down, as much as Stark ever seemed to come down, which meant he was definitely still in motion and still with a slightly manic look on his face. He took a deep breath, nodded decisively and pushed up the once-white sleeves of his dress shirt. "Let's get to it," he said, voice still hoarse from days of screaming that had yet to stop ringing in Darcy's ears. The left side of his face was still swollen and discolored from the beating he'd received when he'd sent the armor off before they could take it.

Darcy nodded, steeled herself. "What do you need me to do?" she asked.

Stark pulled a pair of goggles over his head, kept them on his forehead as he looked over the equipment stacked up high all over the cell. "Why do I keep ending up stuck in the asscrack of nowhere with my own scrap parts?" he muttered. Then he straightened, let out a long breath. He scanned the room for long moments, then went and picked up some kind of metal thingie which, judging by the shape, was probably some kind of bomb or missile casing or something. "Plug in the hack-saw for me, would you?" he asked, muscles straining under the weight of whatever it was he was carrying. When Darcy just looked at him in confusion, he nodded towards some other thingiemajingie. "Plug it in and give me some space," he said.

Darcy did as she was told and stood back to watch as Stark placed the thingie in the thingiemajingie, pulled down his goggles and began to saw. Soon enough she had to look away when the sparks flying everywhere began to make her eyes hurt. The afterimages stayed plastered across her vision for long moments after.

"The hammer," Stark said, an indeterminable amount of time later, holding his hand out imperiously, and this, at least, Darcy could manage without further instructions. Over the next few hours, they fell into a rhythm of Stark muttering instructions while Darcy did her best to comply. As it turned out, when he took the time to explain what he needed and why, Darcy surprised herself with how much she could manage, until she somehow found herself in charge of hammering out the roughest of the dents and curves in the sheets of metal before handing them over for Stark to do the fine work.

"What are we actually doing?" she asked. She'd dropped her ruined blazer a while back and torn off the sleeves of the once-white silk shirt she'd worn underneath, needing some relief from the heat of this kind of work.

"You heard what they asked for," Stark said, which wasn't really much of an answer at all.

Darcy grimaced. "Yeah, no, not really. It got pretty technical, and hanging around Jane all these years kind of helped me learn how to block out technobabble."

Stark cocked an eyebrow. Paired with the goggles, the expression made him look absolutely ridiculous. "Because you don't understand it?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No," she said. "I do, or I think I could if I wanted to. It just... It gives me a headache, makes my mind go all these leaps and bounds and end up places that don't make any sense. Headache, like I said. Easier to block it out." She grimaced. "That sounds stupid, doesn't it?"

Stark shook his head back, the corner of his mouth pulling into something that kinda sorta resembled the shadow of a smile. "Nah," he said. "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Just get over the headache and start working through those thoughts." He shrugged. "Who knows, you might have some of the good stuff in there."

Darcy shrugged and went back to work, aware that she hadn't received an answer but unwilling to press for right now.

Another couple of hours and some nameless faceless goon showed up with whatever passed for a prisoner dinner around these parts, and they sat down together at one of the workbenches to eat. Darcy was halfway through her lump as stale-ass bread when she caught Stark looking at her in some way she couldn't quite understand, analyzing, almost wistful, oddly fond, and somehow she couldn't help but think back on those words, a few days ago, that she hadn't understood one bit. "What was that whole thing about?" she asked. "When the armor protected me? What was it you and JARVIS were talking about?"

His gaze sharpened and then he raised his head and stared straight at something behind her, long enough and pointedly enough that she turned to look. "Some kind of hiccup in JARVIS's programming," he said. "I'll look into it when we get back."

Of course. Security cameras. She really should've thought of that. She couldn't tell if this one recorded audio or not, but she supposed Stark had a better idea about that than she did. "Oh," Darcy said. There was still a sense of relief at the fact that he'd said 'when' rather than 'if'. If Stark thought they'd get out of here alive, they probably would. She hoped. He had a lot more experience getting kidnapped than she did.

Stark rolled his eyes. "Oh," he echoed. He swallowed down the last of his frankly disgusting portion of food. "Eat up," he said. "If you hold back the first few days because it looks like something out of McDonalds' trash, you're going to end up regretting it. Trust me." With that, he got back on his feet and returned to work, far quieter and more subdued and intent than she'd realized Tony Stark was capable of.

***

HYDRA had kindly provided them with a cot. It wasn't a very big cot. Actually, it was small enough that they had to practically cuddle up with each other to avoid ending up on the cold hard floor. And Darcy was neither willing to do that herself nor push a forty-plus-year-old to do it. So cuddling it was. It was strange, though, in that it didn't at all feel like cuddling up to any hot guy she'd ever met. And it wasn't the cameras doing it either. Fuck knew she wouldn't have minded giving HYDRA an eyeful with the right guy. It was just... oddly like anything non-platonic was so ridiculously disgustingly wrong as to be unthinkable. Maybe JARVIS was right and they were cousins of some sort or something. Who knew? She _was_ adopted. (Her parents would've gone mad if that was the case and they'd known, though. Their daughter being related to Maria Carbonell would've been a dream come true for them.)

Mostly, it was like a slumber party, except not, because Stark wasn't really like any of the friends she'd had sleep over as a kid, and definitely nothing like the boys who'd slept over with when she was a teenager. It was... Actually, more than anything, it reminded her of crawling into her parents' bed at six AM on Saturday mornings when she was little. Warm and safe and comforting, even when she didn't understand what was going on around her.

"I wanted a dog when I was a kid, you know," she heard herself say, and she had no idea why that was even coming out. "That was after I gave up on the little sister idea, of course--"

Stark seemed, for a brief moment, to choke on thin air.

"--but Dad was allergic, so no dice. Why am I even-- You don't want to know this."

"Maybe I do," he said. He flashed her the barest of smiles. "Come on, tell me more."

"Well," Darcy began. Then she narrowed her eyes. "You don't look right."

He frowned, seemed to try to focus his eyes, but it was like they kept staring at some point behind her even when he made an obvious effort. His bare forearms were littered in goose bumps. "I'm fine," he said.

Darcy snorted. "You're so not. What's going on, Stark?"

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Feel weird," he admitted. "Haven't felt like this since... Jesus, before you were born." He reached up and rubbed at the junction between his neck and his shoulder, as if there was an itch right beneath the collar of his shirt. He grimaced, then gave a small shake of his head. "Come on," he said. "Tell me about that puppy. I used to want one too. Nice to know I wasn't the only deprived kid in the world."

She cocked an eyebrow. "I find it hard to believe you were ever deprived of anything," she said, and she wanted to ask more questions, she did, but he so obviously didn't want to answer, to even think about whatever it was that was wrong, and for whatever reason she had a lot more hang-ups about pushing him than she did most people she met. "Well, my neighbor," she began, and told the story, and talked, and kept talking until she couldn't keep up any longer and Stark was snoring away beside her.

***

It took the better part of three days for Darcy to realize that in between work on the large and obviously weapony device he was making it clear to all the cameras he was building, Stark created other things. He didn't work on them for more than a few moments at a time, taking hour long breaks between, and always welding and installing circuitry in small nooks and crannies where he could shield it from the cameras with his body. Darcy made sure not to comment on it, and to not look at him any more than she normally did, but she could feel anticipation rise inside her. He had a plan of _some_ kind. They were going to get out of here.

***

When it finally happened, Darcy was still somehow completely unprepared. She hadn't even seen Stark stick whatever rigged up, homemade explosive it was to the door, only barely noticed him snapping some small piece of tech to his belt and strap something, lightning fast, to his arm. Then Stark was pushing her to the floor, covering her with his body, and the door was exploding in a mess of heat and flying splinters. A moment later, he was pulling her to her feet, gripping her wrist and pulling her out of the cell with him, pressing a button on the device on his belt.

"Armor'll be here in two minutes tops," Stark said, fastening one of the straps for the thing on his arm. "We just have to stay alive and outside of the cell for that long."

Darcy frowned. "Out of the cell. Why?"

"They got something in the walls to block radio signals," Stark answered. Then, frowning, he tossed her some small gizmo or other. "Not as good as the Widow's Bite," he said. "But it's the best I could come up with under the circumstances."

Darcy caught it out of midair, felt the tiniest sense of relief settle over her at the weight of a taser in her hand. The hardware was a bit clunky, definitely not on par with what usually came out of SI, but it was easy to familiarize herself with the controls, easy to lull herself into a false sense of security at the knowledge that she at least had some means of defending herself. She shifted her grip, got her thumb over the switch, felt her adrenalin begin to pick up, her pulse start to speed. "Sure," she said. "I guess it'll do. In a pinch."

He threw her a patented Tony Stark bitchface, then turned around so they were back to back. "They'll be here any minute now," he muttered. "Remember, the electrodes carry a charge of their own. They don't stay attached, so you can fire several rounds. There are five charges in there." He sucked in an audible breath, and she could smell his tension in the air, even a hint of fear, but it was a protective kind of fear, almost something like the way Mom had smelled when Darcy had been a dumb kid and set out to do something that would obviously get her hurt. She threw the ridiculous comparison off her mind a moment later, focused on the here and now and the sound and smell of armed goons approaching.

At first, it was damn easy. Two pairs of guards came at them. Darcy got both hers and looked over the shoulder to see Stark had taken down his as well with the thing on his arm that appeared to be the equivalent of a cheap knock-off version of a repulsor. "Don't judge," Stark hissed. "The materials sucked."

"The materials were SI," she said.

"From years ago," he argued defensively. "Also, they didn't let me at any of the good stuff. Pretty sure this first project was supposed to be a test or something."

"Not sure if this means we won or lost," Darcy said.

"It's not over yet," Stark warned, and that was the moment when the alarms began to blare and the light began to blink red and fuck, this was like a bad Bond movie or something, and it only got worse when the next batch of goons showed up. This time there weren't just four of them, but something closer to twenty, and Darcy did not have the firepower to deal with this. "One minute," Stark gritted out, and Darcy grimaced, because one minute could be a hell of a lot of time in the right - or in this case, wrong - circumstances. 

She fired off her remaining charges. Then, "I'm out," she said, loudly enough for Stark to hear but hopefully softly enough that the goons wouldn't pick up on it. Stark gripped her, spun her around so her chest was to his back and pushed her back with his body until she was against the wall, his body shielding hers. He raised the wannabe repulsor and fired against anyone who got close. She heard his pained grunt, felt his body slump as he was hit. Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around him, trying to help hold him up. He fired again and again. More goons were showing up. The sound of bullets and shouts and repulsor whines filled the air. And then, suddenly, there was a sputter and something that sounded almost like the mechanical equivalent of a cough. A moment later, the repulsor went out.

"Shit," Stark hissed, and then his body reared back when another bullet struck. Darcy tightened her arms around him. But what good was it going to do? They still had thirty seconds to go, and they were out of luck and out of options.

And that is how she got here. She's going to die, and she won't ever get to experience having a baby sister. She won't ever make it out of this damn HYDRA base, won't ever help Stark find Hawkeye. She won't ever make it home and tell Jane what a good friend she is, or steal another bottle of Thor's Asgardian booze, or anything. This is it, the end of the line, and there's not a damn thing she can do. She has never been this fucking frightened in her life, like her stomach is one big lump of ice and her throat has closed up, hands trembling and body coated in sweat. It's terrible, and knowing that they can all smell her fear is beyond embarrassing, but even that doesn't matter.

This is the end.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick reminder: While the rules here are almost the same as in 914, these are still two separate universes that aren't ever going to cross over. Neither story would work if I did that.
> 
> Also, I've been debating with myself about chapter length vs. frequency of updates. Any thoughts on that, please let me know.

Several things happen all at once, so damn quickly Darcy can barely even keep it all straight in her own head. First, another bullet hits Stark, and he goes limp in her arms for several long moments. He's surprisingly light. She can hold him up if she wants to, but that won't help a bit. Will just keep him in the role of human shield, and she doesn't want him to die for her. So she lets him slide to the floor, hands still trembling with fear and shock.

Next, one of the HYDRA goons comes so close he's practically within touching distance. Darcy's heart flies into her throat and lodges itself there. She can feel the maddened pounding of it in her fucking skull. The goon takes a step closer, and Darcy acts entirely on instinct. She steps over Stark's body, which is just starting to sluggishly move again, and takes a swing at the goon, keeping the taser in her hand to reinforce her fist. Almost as if in slow motion, her fist makes impact with the goon's face. He isn't quick enough to defend himself. More than that, he actually goes flying, making a neat arc across the hallway only to slam into the opposite wall with a sickening crunch.

Someone else joins the fight. All Darcy sees at first is long, matted hair and a glint of metal. The sound of flying bullets rips the air and a handful of HYDRA goons slump to the ground, all of them hit in places that even Darcy, with her limited expertise, can tell are fatal. Then the stranger is up close, covering her with his body the way Stark was doing mere moments ago, except when this one gets hit with a bullet he doesn't even twitch. He doesn't get hit again, holding his metal left arm up like a shield while his right keeps shooting with perfect aim until all that's left is the click of an empty magazine. He drops the gun, and by now barely a handful of HYDRA guys are left. Metal arm dude leaps at them, faster and stronger than anyone she's seen, and she's damn well seen Thor in action. His first punch leaves an actual dent in one goon's face, and she can hear another's ribs crack under the impact of Metal Arm's foot. The ones left go just as fast, buckling under fist and feet until, for a moment, they're alone in the hallway.

And that's when the armor makes its entrance. It flies down the corridor, scratched and dented, and molds itself around Darcy's body, still uncomfortably tight in the chest area. Even so, she feels herself breathe a sigh of relief, borderline safe for the first time in days. "Go," says Metal Arm, voice rough with either misuse or disuse. "Get outta here."

"Much as I hate to agree with a man who wears eyeliner unironically," Stark manages, wheezing as he pushes himself up onto his knees. "He's right. Get the fuck out. Send the armor back for me when you're safe."

Darcy doesn't want to, fuck but she does not, but then Stark is muttering some over-long string of letters and numbers, saying 'override' and repeating the order to JARVIS, and Darcy is being flown out against her will.

JARVIS finally sets down maybe five miles outside the city, finding a sheltered part of the nearby mountains with several handy caves. He releases her gently, and then he's flying off once more. He returns just minutes later, opening slowly enough that Darcy can get there to catch Stark as he falls out, pale and bleeding and shaking in her arms.

"Hey," she says, and she barely recognizes her own voice. Stark is pale enough that every trace of his usual, healthy shade of olive is gone. "Hey, you all right?" She swallows, and her stomach is heavy and her skin is cold and it's all she can do to control her own breathing. "Stark? Tony. Tony, come on."

He lets out a groan, blinks several times before he manages to properly open his eyes. They're glazed over with pain and blood loss and Darcy is scared as fuck that he might be going into shock. "Bullets," he grits out. "Get out the bullets, before I start healing over them."

Darcy frowns. The fuck? Tony Stark isn't supposed to have a healing factor. "What--" She stops, sucks in a sharp breath. "What am I supposed to use?" she asks. "JARVIS?" she adds, turning her face momentarily to look at where the armor has reassembled itself and is standing as a silent sentry.

"He's not actually carrying tweezers around," Tony snaps. "You've got small hands, right? Get your fingers in there."

Darcy winces. "Dude, do you know how much worse that's going to make everything? Do we even have disinfectant?"

"Not my first rodeo," Tony says. "Or first bullet holes, in this case. Just get the damn things out." Darcy is kind of surprised he's even still talking, let alone still sounding so disturbingly like himself. Then again, like he said, this isn't his first rodeo.

"Okay." She sucks in a deep breath. "Okay. JARVIS, do you have anything so I can at least wash my hands?"

"Negative, Miss Darcy," JARVIS says, and Darcy can't help but frown at that. Doesn't JARVIS call everyone else by their last name? Is it because she hasn't hit twenty-five yet? She pushes the thought away a moment later, needs to focus on Tony and how to get the bullets out of him.

She isn't sure how, but she manages to do it, manages to block out the stark reality of it, to not think too hard about the sight of her fingers going in, of blood oozing, the sensation of blood gushing and muscle tearing around her digits, of her fingertips closing around metal fragments warmed up to match human body heat. By the time she drops the last bloody bullet to the ground, Stark is unconscious on the sheer rock beneath them. Biting down her fear, Darcy drops down herself, careful not to look at her hands even as she can feel the coat of blood drying on them. She pulls Tony's head into her lap, presses her fingers to his neck almost frantically until she finds his pulse, breathes a sigh of relief. Her fingers find a patch of skin under Tony's collar that feels different from the rest. She frowns, curious, and she could really use a distraction right around now, so she looks down, pushes the collar out of the way.

It's old and faded, barely visible let alone recognizable as what it pretty much has to be. It's hardly even glossy anymore, barely a shade darker than his skin, might actually be wholly invisible when he isn't pale from blood loss. It's... But that can't be, can it? Why the fuck would Tony Stark, famously promiscuous and unmated alpha _dog_ , have a bonding scar? Still, looking closer, she can almost make out the smaller scars that make up the whole, the marks where each blunt tooth must've once bitten down. It doesn't make any sense. Makes even less sense when she breathes in and smells, somewhere underneath the dirt and grit and blood and sweat and pain and _dog_ , something sweeter, spiced and honeyed like fucking chai tea or something, something very much bitch. What the-- No. She shakes her head. She's not going to even attempt to make sense of any of this right now. She's tired, she's got a headache, she just pulled bullets out of a man's body and she is very likely hallucinating. Not the time to start 'making an ass out of you and me' or whatever else it was they say the side effects of making blind assumptions are these days. Who knows, it's possible terminology's changed in the week plus she's been off the Internet.

To distract herself, she pushes his clothes out of the way to check on the bullet wounds, wishing like hell that she had medical equipment. He could really use stitches, or actual bandages. Fuck, she'll settle for band-aids right now. One of the wounds is still oozing blood. The other two, though, seem to have already scabbed over, looking a day old rather than, well, however long, maybe half an hour, that it's actually been since she took out the bullets. She feels her face tuck into another frown. Tony Stark isn't supposed to have a healing factor. Jesus, who even is this? The fuck is going on here? "JARVIS," she says. "Are we certain this is Stark?"

"Yes, Miss, without a doubt," JARVIS answers from the armor's helmet.

Darcy blinks. She definitely needs sleep or something, because clearly she really is hallucinating, and that's not something she's ever been prone to - well, except when she's been blackout drunk and that time at Culver with the guys from the biology department and the gene modded mushrooms. Sleep. Sleep is a thing that she really, really needs right now, and as much as she would love a bed, that patch of mossy stuff looks real good right about now. "JARVIS, can you keep an eye out? Wake me if something bad happens."

***

It feels like no time has passed at all when JARVIS makes some kind of odd noise that's probably supposed to simulate the clearing of a throat. "Sir," he says. "Miss. I apologize, but I feel compelled to point out that an unidentified male has come within a kilometer of this spot."

Darcy sits up blearily, rubbing at her eyes. "What?" she mumbles, blinking and biting back a yawn. "What? What, who?" She glances to her side, needing to make sure Tony's okay. He's definitely still breathing. He's mumbling under his breath, something that's probably either Spanish or some form of equation or code - can you speak in binary? He's starting to twitch a bit as well, seeming closer to waking than before. He's got more color to his face too, and Darcy somehow knows, without knowing how she can be so sure, that if she were to check now, all three of his bullet wounds would look several days old.

"I'm afraid I can't positively identify this individual," JARVIS says. "He is heavily armed, but appears not to be making any move to come closer." A pause, and then he's speaking again, sounding actually alarmed this time, and who the hell knew an AI could sound alarmed? "He appears to be looking through the sights of a modified sniper rifle."

Darcy tenses up immediately, gets to her feet and prods and pokes at Stark until he's enough of a help that she can drag him into the cave. She should've done that hours ago. Being out in the open this long was fucking stupid. "Where's he aimed?" she asks.

"He was aiming at yours and Sir's position, Miss," JARVIS says. "He aimed at me immediately after you found cover. He appears to be moving away now." He pauses a moment. "I may have a match," he says.

"Who?" Darcy asks, her whole body still a bit too tight and trembly with the unease of having a sniper rifle pointed at her. Hey, no judgment, please! Darcy would like to see anyone who could stand in a sniper's crosshairs and not be a bit scared.

"Including movement patterns, walking patterns and mannerisms and widening the parameters for body shape to make up for a theoretical loss of weight brings up a ninety-two per cent match to the records from the Washington DC incident last month. I believe the sniper is the Winter Soldier, alias Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes."

Next to her, Tony coughs and pushes himself slowly into a sitting position, slumping a bit to the side. "Is Barnes stalking us now or something?" he asks, voice weak but clear. "JAY, probably send a note to Cap or something. If him and the other two musketeers are still being a nuisance in Peru, they'd probably appreciate being pointed in the right direction."

"Indeed, Sir," JARVIS said. "I have sent both a text message and an email to Captain Rogers as well as Agent Romanoff. I have also taken the liberty of informing them that he has made no hostile moves against you or Miss Darcy, and has, in fact, stepped in to your defense."

Tony lets out a groan. "You're going to be getting poor Rogers' hopes up, you know," he says. "He wasn't really defending us--"

"Wait," Darcy says. "Are you saying that was _Bucky Barnes_ in there?"

"--just happened to be in the same place at the same time, with a common enemy. You _can_ tell Cap his old buddy doesn't seem too fond of HYDRA these days, if you want."

"Noted, Sir," JARVIS says. "I have updated the missives to that effect."

"Because if that was Barnes, he sure as fuck was defending us," Darcy continues. "He stepped in front of me when you collapsed, took a bullet. And without having been there, I can't really say for sure, but I doubt you'd have lasted the time it took the armor to get me here and come back for you if he hadn't done _something_ to keep you safe. Or did you miss the fact that all your bullet holes are from before he showed up?"

"Yeah," Tony says, shakes his head. "No. Nope. Doesn't make sense. Why the hell would Cap's old buddy make Cap and his entourage chase him all over the Americas only to show up where we are and decide not only that he wasn't going to kill us, or even ignore us, but actually, actually defend us? Yeah, nope, he must've recognized us as allies or something, tried to fight _with_ us, and figured this was the best way not to let us get in his way. But actually--"

"He just stopped by to check up on us," Darcy interjects. "Do you remember anything between sending me off and landing here?"

Tony grimaces, nose wrinkling. His beard has grown in and he looks kind of ridiculous, but that's a hell of an improvement on how he looked before their nap, so Darcy'll take it. "Not really," he says.

"Then let it go," she says. "Can't spend all day making up theories about something we can't know." She pauses. "Though I'll still bet you a fifty that he was defending us."

"For what _reason_?" Stark asks. Then he shakes his head, sucks in a shuddering breath, mutters something so low she can't hear it, shakes his head again. "Jesus, I hate it when things don't make sense," he says. "Okay, I see your fifty and raise you by a hundred. And I'll even let it go. For now. We do have a Birdbrain to find." He begins to push himself to his feet, biting back a wince as he goes.

Darcy's hand shoots out, finds his chest and shoves him until he's unbalanced enough to drop right back down on his ass with a muffled 'oof'. "No, you don't," she says. "You're in no condition to go bird hunting. And seriously, stop making me mother you. You're like twenty years older than I am."

"Seventeen," he interjects sulkily.

"Right now, we're going to wait a bit. Maybe send JARVIS out to scavenge some food and water or something, not that he's exactly discreet, but I'm fucking hungry and I could _really_ do with a cheeseburger right now--"

"Ugh," Tony says. "Don't say that word. You're going to make me cry."

"And in the meantime," Darcy continues. "You could tell me why the hell I can use the armor."

Tony clears his throat, then shakes his head. "Nope," he says. "That is not something we're discussing right now."

Darcy purses her mouth, looks at him sharply, wishes he'd make a bit more sense to her, but then, from what she knows, Tony Stark doesn't often make sense to a whole lot of people. "Why?" she asks anyway, because she's curious, because there's some small, instinctive part of her, almost hindbrain-y, that tells her this is important, is something she needs to know, something she has a _right_ to know.

"We're not talking about this right now," Tony reiterates. When Darcy just narrows her eyes at him determinedly, he sighs. "Because that conversation is going to bring up a lot of feels, and I'm even less up for that shit right now than on most other days, so can we just... not?" And he looks so damn exhausted as he says it, so simultaneously old and disturbingly young, that Darcy can't help but let it go. Say what you want, she does have a heart.

Darcy stays silent for long moments, uncertain what to say now. She has a feeling that silence with Tony might actually be oddly comfortable, but it's not a feeling she wants to test out. They're both talkers, both motor mouths to be completely honest, and silence will either be utterly awkward or it will work which would just be utterly weird and unsettling for them both. If that makes any sense. She isn't certain it does, but either way she isn't up for the silence right now. "So, er," she says, and spends a moment searching something, _anything_ , to say. "I guess you had another house blow up on you," she says, and then winces because, really, that probably wasn't the smartest way to start a conversation.

Stark bangs his head back against the cave wall with a groan. Doesn't look like he did it hard enough to hurt himself, at least. "Don't even..." He sighs. "JARVIS, did I ever design a house that would work here?"

"I believe you made some plans in an, as you say, 'drunken science spree', around eleven years ago that might work, Sir. Would you like me to factor in arc reactor technology?"

"Sure," Tony says. "Bring in the construction crews." He frowns. "Or maybe we should make it a hotel. Hold it for a bit, JAY. Let me think this through. Is this a tourism spot at all?"

"Certainly is, Sir," JARVIS says. "It even hosts its own international bicycle race, amongst other sporting events."

Tony frowns for a moment, then, "Put up a hotel designing contest or something. Let's do it like that. No way I'm ever coming back here. Might as well make a bit of money off the spot."

Darcy blinks, utterly unused to the concept of just being able to say something and have it happen without any additional work. God, what a fucking paradise that would be, though. "JARVIS, can you buy me a cupcake factory or something?" she says. "I could use the cash."

"I'm afraid you don't have the startup money to enter into this venture, Miss," JARVIS says with perfect equilibrium.

"Damn," Darcy says, shrugging. "Hey," she adds when Tony cocks an eyebrow at her. "It was worth a try. And being the head of a cupcake empire would be fucking awesome. Imagine being able to say 'I'm at the top of this cupcake'?"

Tony manages to look skeptical for a moment before he bursts out laughing. "I usually hang out in donuts," he says. "You don't get as many sparkles on you that way."

Darcy hums. "Not a bad idea."

"Do you even know how to make a cupcake?" Tony asks. "Or a donut?"

Darcy waves her hands impatiently. "Completely beside the point."

Rather than answer, Tony slumps back against the wall. He's paler again, so obviously exhausted, and his eyes are drooping shut. "Nap," he says. "I need another fucking nap."

Darcy nods, and leaves him be.

***

"Miss," JARVIS is saying. "MISS." There's extra volume to his voice, giving Darcy some clue that he must've been trying to get her attention for a while.

God, she never even decided to go to sleep. She's not sure how the hell that happened. "What?" she manages, voice slurred even to her own ears. "What's going on?"

"Sergeant Barnes just re-entered the one kilometer mark," JARVIS says. "He seems to be carrying something."

Immediately, Darcy is awake and alert. "Can you scan for explosives or something?"

"He's clean, Miss," JARVIS says. "No active explosives, weapons holstered. He is four hundred yards away at this point."

"Four _hundred_?" Darcy sucks in a deep breath, feels fear begin to tug at her nerves. Despite her earlier argument that the Winter Soldier had been trying to protect them, it's still fucking disconcerting to have the world's best assassin that close.

"Well, it did take a while to wake you," JARVIS says, and he sounds so petulant Darcy's pretty damn sure she'd have been very amused in most other situations. God, JARVIS is the best thing ever. If she could've invented a talking computer, he'd be exactly like that. Well, a bit dirtier and slightly less English, but still... She should tell him that sometime.

"Sorry," she says, and she almost actually means it.

"Do not concern yourself, Miss," JARVIS says primly. "Sir can be far more difficult to wake than that." He pauses, and she can see the armor moving just the tiniest bit outside the cave entrance before it comes to a standstill again. "Sergeant Barnes has put his bag down on the ground. He is currently walking away."

Darcy blinks, confused. "Think this is an ambush, or could you go out and check what it is?"

"I believe the armor's speed is sufficient for me to investigate without too much risk, so long as you and Sir stay behind cover."

Darcy nods, glances down at where Tony's still snoring away. Once again, he's got more color to him, almost properly olive again. "Sure thing, JARVIS," she says, and watches as the suit flies out only to return less than a minute later with a battered bag in its metallic hand. "What've you got there?" she asks.

"Two portions of asado," JARVIS says. "Argentinean barbeque," he adds. "With sides, everything still warm. Five liters of water, two magnum bottles of red wine, seven candy bars, a lighter and a half-smoked pack of cigarettes."

Darcy blinks, frowns, reaches out her hands for the bag and looks inside for confirmation. She shakes her head. "What the ever-loving fuck?" Then she shrugs, reaches inside the bag and pulls out a chocolate bar. She rips the wrapper and sticks it in her mouth, doesn't even bother to bite back a moan when sweetness hits her tongue for the first time in what feels like forever. She reaches out, shakes Tony until he's blinking up at her sleepily, yawning and doe-eyed,

"What?" he asks, syllable soft and voice hoarse with sleep.

"Food," she says. "Smells delicious. No cheeseburgers, and it might very well turn out to be poisonous, coming to us via the Winter Soldier Express and all, but you need to eat if your healing factor works anything like Thor's."

"What the ever-loving fuck?" He asks, the sentence coming out like one long, slow word, and damn, Darcy has never known someone else who could voice her thoughts as well as she can. Slowly, movements as weak as those of a man much older than him, Tony pushes up onto his elbows, and she can't help but think that he'll be fucking gorgeous once he grows into his features. As it is, with his beard untrimmed and his eyes too-wide and sleepiness wiping out the sparse lines of his face, his beauty is as awkward as that of a half-grown baby bird - lips too perfectly shaped and eyes too damn wide - and fuck that is a strange thought to have about someone more than forty years old. And what the hell is up that she can think someone beautiful (if awkwardly so) and potentially gorgeous and still not be attracted to them at all? Something's clearly wrong with her. "Food?" he asks.

"I am hungry," he acknowledges, eyes scrunching up in what appears to be deep, sleepy thought. "Barnes bought takeaway?"

"Something like that," Darcy says. "Local barbeque and wine and chocolate and stuff." She frowns for a moment, handing over one of the takeaway boxes of barbeque when he makes grabby hands. "Do you smoke?"

He slowly, carefully, cracks the plastic open, grips his spork and knife and digs in. "Not since I was sixteen," he says between bites. "Well," he amends a few moments later. "Not really. Not _often_. It is a passable substitute for alcohol when I need a clear head." He chews his way through several more mouthfuls, damn near moaning around them. "Sometimes, I guess. Why?"

Darcy shrugged. "No reason. Just... why would he make a fucking care package and include cigarettes?" She rolls her eyes when Tony makes grabby hands again, hands over the half-empty pack and the lighter before opening the wine - screw-on lid, thank fuck - and taking a long swallow before putting the lid back on and finding her own box of takeaway. "Hell, why the care package at all?"

"He cares?" Tony suggests, blowing out a mouthful of smoke and claiming the wine for himself, screwing the lid back off and drinking deeply. "Huh, that's actually pretty damn good," he comments. "Couple of hundred dollar bottle. Cheaper if it's local, of course. But still. Damn..."

Darcy takes her first bite of asado and damn near moans around it. "Best. Stalker. Ever."

Stark nods in agreement and offers the wine back. Darcy's about to take it when she decides not to. Two bottles of wine, magnum or otherwise, might not be all that much to Tony Stark, especially if she's right about his healing factor. But coupled with his exhaustion and injuries, it might be just enough to get him a bit more talkative. 

"You know what," she says. "Keep the wine. I think I prefer water for this. Hand me a smoke, though."

Tony looks at her askance for a moment, seems almost like he's about to say something. Then he shrugs, lights up a second cigarette and hands it over before taking another deep swallow of red and washing it down with a lungful of smoke. They fall back into that silence that should be so unnatural but is actually oddly comfortable, Tony drinking wine and smoking while Darcy works through the candy bars - what? If she has to give up her share of the wine to the cause, she best damn well get some chocolate in return.

He's halfway through the second bottle of wine when she begins to work on figuring out ways to get him to speak. She's probably going to have to be subtler than before, if he really doesn't want to talk about it. Even buzzed, he's scary intelligent, and probably needs to be led in circles for a bit before she can approach the subject in some roundabout kind of way. "You know," he says suddenly, cutting off her thoughts. "You look like my mom."

She cocks an eyebrow. "Well, if we're all related and stuff, shouldn't really be that much of a surprise, should it?" Even so, she can't help but smile a little. Mom told her the same thing once, that she reminded her of a young Maria Carbonell. It hadn't meant all that much to Darcy, but it meant so damn much to Mom she couldn't help the burst of pride in her chest. "My parents thought your mom was a fucking saint or something," she tells him. "They loved her to bits, always went on and on about how she changed this country for the better and all that shit. They hated your dad, but..." She gives a brief shrug.

Tony lets out a laugh. "Howard was an asshole," he says. "He needed an heir, so he needed to get married, and he was good enough at predicting trends to know that if he went for the typical top one per cent, white, conservative beta girl, it wouldn't do him any political favors in the long run. So, in his own words, he had to follow the civil rights movement trends, which meant the question was whether he wanted an alpha bitch or a black woman. Given the fit he threw when I first told him I made friends with Rhodey, I guess there wasn't really much choice at all for him in there. Of course, my mom was still top one per cent in wealth and intelligence, white, and beautiful. Her only flaws were being alpha and being revolutionary. I think he regretted that move more times than I can count, and I can count to a hell of a lot."

Darcy winces, tries to imagine that, growing up with a dad who didn't love her mom unconditionally. She can't. Hell, she can't imagine having Maria Carbonell for a mother in the first place. Sure, she was larger than life, such a huge political figure, always painted damn near perfect by Darcy's parents. But imagining that condensed into mother form? She isn't sure she can get that to make sense at all. "What are you then?" she asks, not that it makes any sense to the conversation. It's just that it's suddenly getting heavy and she needs to pull it back on slightly more comfortable ground. "American or Spanish?"

Tony rolls his eyes. "Dual citizenship, kind of," he says. "Howard insisted on American, obviously, but my mom was all about being proudly Spanish whether or not Franco had kicked her out, so she insisted on that, and the compromise ended up being both."

"Huh," Darcy says. "That must be cool. You know, having two legit passports."

Tony shrugs. "Can get a bit messy, honestly. Anyway, Clint and Nat both have at least ten times that."

"Not legit," Darcy says.

Tony shrugs and throws back another deep swallow of wine. "They still have them."

Silence takes back over, and Darcy is pretty sure it'd be just as comfortable as before if not for the question she wants, _needs_ , so badly to ask. It's not even just her own curiosity anymore. It's her hindbrain telling her it's important, something she needs to figure out because otherwise the world around her won't ever properly make sense at all. Still, she lets it go on, forces herself to relax into it, because she might not know Tony all that well but even she knows enough to know that he won't take better to being forced than she would in the same situation.

"You deserve to know," Tony says, when there can only be a few swallows of red left in the second bottle. "Don't you? I just-- I got so used to never thinking about it. Only two people alive even know, and I just. It's just Rhodey and me, and we don't talk about it." He stops, swallows. "It hurts, you know?"

Darcy grimaces, tries her best to show some sort of sympathy. "I still don't know what the hell you're talking about," is still somehow what makes it out of her mouth.

Tony stays silent for long moments, bottle clenched in his fists, his eyes impossibly far away. "Howard always wanted me to be a beta, you know?" he says at long last. "I may not remember the doctors actually telling him which was which, but it had this kind of ripple effect I felt all my childhood." He pulls a face. "And don't... I didn't have some kind of awful childhood. Don't make that out of it. I don't want-- Howard was a shit, but my mom was an angel whenever she was around, and there was Jarvis and Anna and Peggy and I was... I got everything I needed to turn all my craziest fantasies into reality, you know? What child could've asked for more?"

Darcy bites back a grimace, tries not to let out the sympathetic noises that want out of her throat. As deserved as they may be, she doubts Tony is the kind of person who'll ever, in a million years, appreciate them. She doesn't tell him how much more he should've asked for, how much more he was owed. Maybe, if he doesn't know, it won't hurt as much. Or something. Really, she doesn't know. There's a reason she didn't master in psychology.

"I spent so long trying to get his attention, trying to get him to approve of me for me, whatever my dynamic, whatever my sex or gender," Tony continues, when it's clear Darcy's not going to answer his, hopefully, rhetorical question. "I built and built and built, tried to make myself this perfect little Howard clone. I must've been ten or something when I first found the plans for the projects he'd given up on. Maybe everything else would've been different if I hadn't. But I needed to prove myself to him so badly, so I stole those plans, and I improved them, and I built the prototypes and I... He punched me in the face when I made the hover car, you know." 

The sarcastic grin on Tony’s face is so painfully fragile it tugs at something deep inside of Darcy, and she wants to hit Howard Stark so bad her hands itch. "Because he never could do it right. The design was shelved, eventually. It wasn't practical, or cost-efficient, so I guess I understand why..." He stops a moment, sucks in a sharp breath. "Anyway," he says. "Around the time when I hit my teens, I realized that to him I was so essentially wrong that nothing I could ever do would be right. And idiot child that I was, I decided to get his attention the only way I still knew how. I was going to piss him off every which way and so damn often there was no way he would ever be able to ignore me again." He lets out a laugh, but it sounds so hollow it's damn near painful to hear, and Darcy knows without knowing how she knows that every attempt he makes at creating distance just makes it that much more painful for him. Because, somehow, that old wound has never quite scabbed over.

"I'm sorry," she tries to say, but he shakes his head, talks over head,

"Don't. I don't need that. I don't _want_ that. I don't want to ever have to think about this ever again, but you-- This is for you, so just... Just let me talk, please. Don't make me lose my train of thought, or." He swallows audibly, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. "I started this," he says. "Please, fucking Jesus in an outhouse, let me finish."

Darcy sucks in a sharp breath, and as much as she wants to comfort, as much as she wants to tell him that what happened was wrong (and what the fuck is up with that? Darcy is not a comforter or a nurturer. She's, if anything, the least experienced alpha on the planet. She doesn't deal well with her own problems, let alone anyone else's). Instinct shuts her up. She knows, somehow, that this is her one shot at answers, and she does have enough self control, at least, to let the thirst for knowledge rule her for a moment at least. She'll have to thank Jane on some later date. "Sorry," she says.

Tony shakes her off, curls up around himself, arms wrapping around his knees in a gesture that makes him look, all over again, so much younger than his actual years. His distressed scent is so sharp and clear to her it's all she can do not to ask him to shut up. She keeps herself in check. He sucks in a sharp breath. "It escalated, you know. Pretty quickly too. One day I was inviting random kids over and daring them to smash the manor windows, the next I was sleeping around and getting myself black-out wasted every single weekend. Howard didn't respond to a damn thing. Perfectly honest, Maria never reacted either. I love her to death. She's my mom. She's..." He pauses, swallows. "She was almost as far away as Howard sometimes. She was a better person, and I know she loved me back, and... She just wasn't there." 

He barely bites back a laugh, having seemingly learned that she's not going to react to it in any kind of positive way. "Sorry," he says. "With your parents, I guess that's not easy to hear. You can be a child of the revolution, and even a child of the revolutionary, and then for long weeks on end, you still feel like an orphan." He pauses, raises the bottle of red and damn near empties it in one swallow. "Sorry," he says again. "Not what you want to hear. Maria... She was amazing. I loved her to death. And I wasn't just an heir to her, not like to Howard. I may have been the photograph she passed around as she tried to have the laws passed, but I was more than that." Another hoarse laugh. "Who the hell knows what'd have been different with both of them if I'd been born beta? Anyway." He gives a quick, violent shake of his head. "She let me curl up with her whenever I wanted and she was around when I was a pup, like any alpha bitch with any other pup in the world. She taught me to be the kind of alpha that was respected but not feared. She..." He snaps his mouth shut, as if he was just about to say something he shouldn't have. "She was a great woman, larger than life. Best role model I ever knew." Still, he avoids her gaze.

"Stop stalling," Darcy says, keeping her voice soft so the words won't wound in and of themselves, and fuck if she ever imagined she might ever be in a position to wound Tony Stark, but right now she is. She isn't sure why, or how she even knows, but he's more vulnerable, right now, than she's ever thought he could possibly be. It's damn near painful to see him like this.

"I knew my mother loved me, even when she didn't have that much time," Tony repeats. He takes the last swallow of red and puts the bottle down beside him. "I was never really all that worried about her. But I needed Howard's attention. By the time I was a teenager, it was a fucking obsession." His words are slurred by now, or they would be if they weren't stumbling over each other so fast Darcy can barely keep up enough to make them out. "If I couldn't make him l-lo--" He stops again, shakes his head once more. "I was damn well going to make him hate me. So I--"

"You guys miss me?" says the Iron Man helmet in an unfamiliar voice.

"Birdbrain," Stark says, grinning. "We came to save you."

"And somehow I still end up the one doing the saving," Barton says. "Fuck, don't ever try the spy game again, Stark. You fucking suck at it. You too, Lewis. Listen, I'm going to touch the jet down a kilometer or so away. The ground here should serve as an airfield. You make your way here, and we're out of Argentina."

Darcy wants to kill Hawkass like she's never wanted to kill a single fucking person in her life.

***

"Where the hell were you?" Stark asks once all three of them are safe within the passenger cabin with two of Stark's own personal pilots manning the jet. "How did you even get out?"

"HYDRA facility, same as the one where you guys were held, far as I can figure," Barton says. "Was there for God knows how long, then the whole thing blew and I was caught under the rubble for a while. Next thing I know, Cap is pulling me out and telling me to come get you." He shrugs. "I don't know what the hell's going on, but at least I followed orders this time. Fucking hell, the two of you make the worst secret agents ever."

"Fuck you very much," Tony says, but there's a small grin on his face. He leans his head back against his seat, lets out a long groan, and doesn't protest when Barton rushes over with a first aid kit, strips him down and goes to town on his injuries. "What about my weapons?" Tony asks. "We were supposed to get them first."

"I already got them," Barton says. "That's how they caught me. Why they wanted you to build new ones. Don't even think about that right now anyway. We need to get you patched up."

"Get me a whiskey," Tony says. "I'll be fine in the morning. Darcy got the bullets out already. I should be mostly healed up by now. Just need to sleep off the blood loss."

"You sound like Cap when he's being an idiot, moron," Barton says. "Now sit still and let me patch you up, and if you're a good boy, I'll let you have a fucking whiskey afterwards."

Tony turns his head, considering. He shrugs. Then, "Hey, are you okay? They had you too?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Barton says. "Hungry as all hell, but I'm fine."

"Get Birdbrain some food," Tony calls before relaxing back into his seat. "Okay, go ahead. Patch me up."

Barton rolls his eyes even as he carefully examines Tony's wounds, disinfects them and bandages them up. "Your 'non-existent' healing factor is pretty damn effective," he says. "Someone get Stark a whiskey," he calls.

A flight attendant walks in moments later, hands Tony a tumbler of scotch whiskey on the rocks and Barton a steaming plate of something so damn fancy Darcy doesn't have the first clue what it's even called. Then the attendant turns to Darcy for a moment, smiling. "Would you like anything, Miss Lewis?"

"You know what?" Darcy lets herself relax, lets her face fall into a grin. "I'll have that whiskey too, I think. Bit of soda in it. That would be really good right about now, really fucking good."

When Darcy's drink arrives Barton looks up from where he's been intent on damn near inhaling his food, looks back and forth between Darcy and Tony, cocks an eyebrow. "Anyone ever tell the two of you how much you look alike? Well, Tony's darker, obviously, and Darcy, your eyes are smaller, but." He shrugs. "Seriously, it's be all kinds of creepy when you're both sipping from a glass of whiskey."

"Fuck you very much, Barton," Tony says again, even as Darcy says, "JARVIS thinks we're related."

"Oh-hoh-hoh," Barton crows. "Tony you _dog_. You weren't even... Shit, Darce, what year were you born?"

Darcy frowns. "Eighty-nine," she says.

"Well, fuck," Barton says. "Seventeen, man? Either you were a very stupid teen or a very prolific one, and honestly, I'm not sure whether to channel Nat and scold you or offer you a high five, but--"

"Clint?" Tony cocks an eyebrow. "Shut the fuck up. I didn't get anyone pregnant. Ever. I was always really fucking careful about that, not that you're going to believe me."

"You're right," Barton interjects. "I'm not."

"Well, that's because you're an asshole," Tony says. "'I did not sleep with that woman' and all that. Seriously. I never got anyone pregnant, so just let it the fuck go."

Darcy frowns, and while part of her wants to stay loyal for some reason she can't even begin to decipher, another senses a possible ally, and there's no fucking way in hell she's going to turn down that chance. "We never did finish our chat, did we, Stark? Howard. How were you going to make him hate you?"

"Birdbrain," Tony says, completely ignoring Darcy's question. "I kind of think you're actually out of line here, to be honest. This is racial profiling, or slut profiling, or _some_ kind of profiling, and I know that makes you a bad person."

Barton punches Tony in the arm, but even Darcy can tell he isn't putting any strength behind it. "I'm a white guy telling two white people they look alike," he says. "How's anything about that going to make me a profiler? Also, didn't Darcy just say even JARVIS admits I'm right?"

Tony blinks, takes a deep drag of his whiskey. "You suck," he says. "Also, I want a cigarette now, and fucking damn Barnes for getting me back on those death sticks."

Barton makes a disgusted face. "You're not smoking in a closed cabin," he says. Then shakes his head. "What the fuck. How did the Winter Soldier get you hooked on cigarettes?"

"Probably a forties kind of thing. They weren't called death sticks back then, after all. Pretty sure even Cap has one every once in a while when he thinks no one's watching." Barton just keeps looking, not responding, and Tony groans, rolls his eyes. "Part of his weird little care package," Tony says with a shrug. "He also sent wine, so now I'm not sure whether he is the actual Winter Soldier or some kind of weird blind date who didn't show up for the actual date part. Also, is he trying to date Lewis or me?"

Darcy holds up her hands. "Don't look at me. He's not my type. I like dark and brooding, sure, but _talkative_ , for the love of God."

"Also," Barton says. "I'd really like to hear the tail end of that conversation the two of you have apparently been having. How did you try to make Howard hate you, Iron Dick?"

"You know?" Tony says. "I think I'll take that as a compliment. Also, I need to sleep, Legolas. I'm horrendously injured and all that shit. Leave me the fuck alone." And with that, he curls up on his side in the seat, looking terribly small all of a sudden and, fucking hell, pretty much does go straight to sleep.

Barton looks at Darcy, cocks an eyebrow. "You've got his nose, you know. Or you would've, if he hadn't managed to get his broken more times than anyone wants to count. His face too. Not his eyes. Your mom must've had grey eyes, only way you could've got them. Not exactly a dominant gene. But yeah, the resemblance is definitely there."

Darcy opens her mouth. Shuts it again. She has no idea what the hell she wants to say to this.

"Wow," Barton says. "Someone bring me a shot of something strong. I've got a drinking game going with this awesome guy, designation Hawkeye, and I deserve a damn good shot for shutting up a Stark. Don't manage to do that anywhere near as often as I want to."

"Not a Stark," Darcy grumbles, but even she isn't all that sure anymore. "I'm a Lewis. My parents had green and blue eyes. They both had lighter hair than me. It's not who you looks like that makes someone your parent."

"No," Barton agrees. "It isn't. But." He pauses, shrugs, and for a moment Darcy thinks his gaze has gone distant until she realizes he's just looking past her, at his passed out teammate laid out on a recliner seat. "He's _Tony Stark_ and he's Tony Stark. And sometimes, knowing where you come from means a hell of a lot, even if it doesn't make anyone family. Trust me, I know."

Darcy cocks an eyebrow.

"Yeah, nope," Barton says. "Going to take another few years before I give you the back-story there. Now, where did you come from?"

"A basket in front of a fire station in Manhattan," Darcy says.

"Ouch," Barton says. He pauses a moment, looks at Tony's sleeping form again. "For what it's worth, I know his annoying ass. And he wouldn't have done that if he didn't think it was the right choice. And honestly, Tony Stark at seventeen... I kind of have to agree with his decision. You are better off for whatever happened there." He grimaces. "Aaand, let me quote him for just one second. 'There are feels here and they hurt and they're fucking _feels_ and let's please just change the subject'."

Despite herself, Darcy lets out a laugh. "That does sound like him," she says. She doesn't say that it sounds like her too, even though it does. That's not the point here, and besides JARVIS saying they're closely related, what proof does she even have? What does 'closely' mean anyway? Whatever the hell Barton's going on about is definitely out of the realm of possibility. Somehow, however, the next thing that makes it out of her mouth is, "Did you know Tony at seventeen?"

"Hell no," Barton says. "And thank fuck. According to his file, he was a train wreck that year. Parents died December of eighty-eight. He went into rehab or something in May of eighty-nine, made it back to school by October and spent the rest of his time at MIT wasted out of his mind on whatever substance he could get his hands on. There were actually rumors he'd bonded or eloped or something. Didn't sleep around for nearly two years. Guess your mom must've made quite the impression, if I'm right here."

Darcy sighs. "I'm sure she did," she says. "If any of this actually pertains to me at all. He could still be just a distant cousin--"

"I don't think you understand the definition of 'close family'," Barton says.

"And either way, I've got a family. I've got a father who loves me. I had the best mom ever. None of this actually matters."

"So you aren't the least bit curious?" Barton says, and Darcy kind of wants to reach out and punch him, except that'd probably just add fuel to his fire.

"I'm curious," she admits. "Very doubtful of your ability to help me out here, though." She sighs, leans back in the seat and curls up. "Now, excuse me, Hawkass, but I kind of think Tony has the right idea here." She shuts her eyes and wills herself to sleep. It takes barely a moment before that familiar haze begins to take her over.

"Fucking Starks," Barton grumbles, and then Darcy is too asleep to hear anything else.

***

"What are you up to?" Darcy asks, glancing around the lab space that Jane has taken over as her own.

Jane lets out a long, full-bodied groan. "So far, unsuccessfully trying to digitally access something resembling a quantum mechanics level of the universe, except none of my damn matrices are holding up at all." And beyond that it gets even less understandable, becomes the kind of babble Darcy has carefully trained herself to block out to avoid a huge ass headache.

Darcy waves her hands in front of her face, grimacing. "I love you and all," she says. "But please try not to speak physics to me. It hurts and it makes me think, and that's a cruel fucking thing, _Jesus_. I just got used to mechanical engineering. Wait at least a couple months before you try to build on top of that."

Jane flashes her a brief half-grin that seems only marginally depressed, and Darcy's all too willing to count that as a win. "I'm glad you made it back safe," Jane says.

Darcy grins. "You ever doubt me?" she asks. "Now, do you need me to do you anything, or--"

Jane makes a shooing motion with her hand. "Go get some rest. You got kidnapped. You must be exhausted."

Darcy shrugs, but eventually decides not to tempt the gift horse. Or however it is that metaphor's supposed to go. She turns around and absolutely does not skip out of the lab, because she is twenty years more than four years old and is so fucking done with skipping. Kind of. She still has a Tony Stark to corner somewhere, and Barton's words on the plane have only made her that much more determined. She's getting her explanation, whether Tony wants to give it to her or not. She's still making her way up to the common floor when she damn near bowls Banner over, and that is just fucking embarrassing. So not the best way to meet a new person, even if he only manages to be kind of vaguely hot in the professor-who-has-thankfully-nothing-in-common-with-your-dad kind of way. "Sorry," she says, straightening up and putting herself back to rights. "Sorry, didn't see you there."

"Don't even worry about it," Banner says. He cocks his head to the side, looks at her more closely. "Hey, did anyone ever tell you--"

"--That I look like Tony with boobs and grey eyes?" Darcy says. "Yeah, I'm getting kind of used to that whole thing, actually."

"I was going to say that your master's paper on superpowereds' effect on politics and the people in power was inspired, actually," Banner says. He frowns at her for a moment, giving her a once-over that's all the more creepy for how analytical it is. Clinical. "Huh," Banner says. "You actually do look like him. That is kind of disturbing."

Darcy cocks an eyebrow.

Banner shrugs. "You've got the same chin," he says. "Though there's something paler in the mix. Other side of your family has to have had the gene for grey eyes, definitely. Probably a lot more Northern Europe and a lot less Mediterranean." He pauses for a moment, looks distinctly uncomfortable. "Could easily be a coincidence, though," he says then. "Perhaps you've both just got 'one of those faces' or something similar."

Darcy sighs. "Fuck you very much, giant green rage monster. You've been absolutely no help at all."

Banner blinks at her, then shrugs. "Yeah, that did not convince me otherwise."

***

It isn't until Thor shows back up (after a couple of weeks that Darcy's spent helping Jane finish up the project and being bluntly ignored by Tony Stark), takes on look between Darcy and Tony and apologizes for several long minutes before beginning to call her the 'young lady of Stark' that Darcy completely loses her shit. She heads down to the workshop, all determination, and spends fifty minutes arguing with JARVIS before she's let in.

Tony's in front of her, leaned over his desk and carefully soldering the delicate circuitry of some important thingimajing or other. Darcy leaves him alone. And keeps leaving him alone. And keeps keeping it up until, several hours later, he finally notices her, jumping a bit at the surprise of it. "Jesus, Darce. I've got a heart condition. Don't tempt fate like that."

Darcy sighs. "Pretty sure the doctors dealt with your heart condition already, right?"

"Still," Tony says. "Sneaking up on people is really, really rude. I'm sure your parents taught you some manners. Ugh, yeah, that sounds old-fashioned, I know, but manners are still a thing these days, and they are definitely a thing that still need to be pursued, Miss Lewis."

"Don't warrant a 'Ms', do I?" Darcy says.

Tony frowns, shakes his head. "Nah," he says. "You haven't even turned twenty-five yet."

Darcy rolls her eyes and sets her ass down into the couch Tony keeps at the edge of his work space. "So," she says. "Everyone around here seems to now think that you're my bio dad."

"Am not," Tony says, even as his shoulders tense, too damn visible when all he's wearing with his battered jeans is a worn, black wife-beater. The mark she thought she saw after they were prisoners together has vanished entirely. More than likely, it was only ever a product of her imagination anyway.

Darcy shrugs. "We do share a lot of features," she says. "And my coloring could probably have been normal if you'd had me with some Irish girl or something." She swallows for a bit. "I'm not going to blame you, you know," she says then. "If my mother chose to give me up, you probably made the right choice in supporting her decision. Besides, me with seventeen-year-old you would've probably been a disaster anyway."

"I'm not your dad," Tony says, voice still simple even as the tone of it is cracking beneath it all, revealing something she doesn't know how to handle at all. "Please get that stupid idea out of your head before it turns out to be something with actual consequences. People like to kidnap me, you know. They think you're my kid and they'll never let you have another day to yourself in your life. These aren't the coattails you want to fly on. Trust me."

"You never told me what you did to piss off Howard," Darcy says. "I think now might be a pretty damn good time, you know?"

"Sucky time," Tony says. "Really, honestly sucky. Just... go away and leave this whole fucked up thing alone."

"Afraid I can't do that," Darcy says. She pauses, sucks in a sharp breath. "Tony," she says then. "Are you my bio dad?"

Tony rolls his eyes. "Nope," he says, popping the 'p' like a fucking child. "Now, either help me out or get the fuck out of my 'shop."

Darcy sighs, giving it up for now. She needs to get way more alcohol into him. And nicotine as well, possibly. Hey, the combination worked last time. For now, she's going to have to bide her time. "What are you working on?" she asks.

He opens his mouth, then snaps it back shut with a brief glance at the holographic representation of whatever it is he's doing. "Nothing," he says. "Just go right back up."

"Tony," Darcy says, drawing his name out. "I can help. I have helped you already. Not entirely useless here, remember." There's something very familiar about the plans she's looking at, though she can't be entirely certain.

"No," he says. "Nope. Don't need any help. Not one bit. Just." He cuts himself off and returns to whatever the fuck it is he's doing.

The whole situation definitely needs some grease. Of the alcohol persuasion. Darcy looks around the workshop for long moment before she finally spots the liquor cabinet. She makes her way over there, wishing she has someone around she can bum cigarettes off of even as she finds a tumbler and a mini freezer, pulls out the ice and pours the rest of the glass full of rum. She brings it over and sets it down right next to where his hands are moving at downright incredible speeds.

He pauses a moment before returning to his work even as one hand shots out, grips the tumbler and brings it up to his mouth. He empties it in a long swallow. Darcy refills it, keeps the bottle right on hand. "JARVIS," she says after the fourth glass, when Tony seems deep enough in his engineering stupor not to hear her. "Can you order some Chinese and a pack of Marlboros? Have it all delivered to this level?"

"Certainly, Miss," JARVIS says, and doesn't even ask for Tony's confirmation.

Darcy chances another glance at the schematics. Feels her eyes widen and her jaws drop. "That's my taser," she says.

"Correction," Tony says absentmindedly. "This _was_ your shitty as hell taser. Obviously, five rounds wasn't nearly enough. Going to take care of the power distribution, and figure out some way to fit more electrodes in there. Darts, maybe? Darts should work."

"You're..." Darcy pauses, sucks in a breath. "You're working on that for _me_?"

"Gotta keep you safe," Tony says. "Don't I." It's not a question, not at all, just barely more than a statement of fact.

"Tony." Darcy takes a deep breath, steels herself. She tries to find the calm center of her being or whatever the hell it is Banner told her that one time yesterday, tries to remain cool and aloof. "Why do you even care?"

"I just--" Tony shrugs, falls silent again as he drains the newly refilled tumbler. "Slept with the president's son, once, did you know? He looked so much like... God, nevermind. Just some fucked up dream or something."

"Tony," Darcy says. "Are you my father?"

"No," Tony says. "Nope. Wrong word." He lets out an entirely uncharacteristic giggle. "Can you hand me the miniaturized monkey wrench?"

"Sure, Monkey Wrench," she says. She hands it over, stays still for long moments as she steels herself all over again. "Tony, what happened with your dad? What aren't you telling me?"

Tony rolls his eyes. "Well," he says, and he sounds pained and strained, and she kind of almost wants to ask him to drop it. "Once upon a time there was a Christmas that went very, very wrong. I was-- Oh, shit!"

Darcy sees the fire almost at the same time Tony does. She jumps back, and all she can do is watch as Dummy blitzes it all with a fire extinguisher.

"You know," Tony says. "I could really use that monkey wrench right around now."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who bookmarked, subscribed or left kudos, and especially those who left comments. Means the world to me.
> 
> Thanks so much, once again, to Potrix for the quick, good and hilarious beta. Your little comments put huge smiles on my face.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy wants answers, dammit. And gets them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realise I forgot to mention earlier that I changed the timeline from canon to get everything in this story to fit together. So, put as briefly as I can, Tony was born in '72 rather than '70, and finishes his bachelor degree(s) in the spring of '89. Howard and Maria Stark died in a car crash, or however WS killed them, in December of '88. Darcy was born in September of '89. The story, so far, has taken place in May/June of 2014, almost directly after the events of Cap2.
> 
> Also, as mentioned several times in the fic, Tony isn't aging properly, and is decribed several times as 'small' or 'young-looking' or 'awkward'. Basically, yeah, his aging halted at his early to mid twenties, and I think everyone here knows how to look up Robert Downey Jr. circa 1990, which is about the look we're dealing with here, regardless of his actual age. Plus beard. Because in this universe the not-aging thing is what brought on the van dyke. The reasons for this should be outlined in the fic. Feel free to hit me up with any questions.
> 
> Thanks, again, to Potrix for the brilliant beta.

Tony's eyes are wide and dark, staring at Darcy from a face half-covered in fire-extinguisher foam. The stuff is all over him, clinging to his shirt and his hair and his beard, and he looks so utterly fucking ridiculous Darcy can't help but laugh her ass off as she looks at him. She knows she's probably as big a mess as he is, but like this, rumpled, big-eyed and surprised-annoyed, he's so childlike he's both endearing and damn hilarious. "I don't think the monkey wrench is really what you need," she manages in between (mature, ladylike) snorts.

He shrugs and raises one arm to wipe the foam off his face. "I really could use it, though," he says. "Do you want a proper taser or not?"

"I want a damn good one," Darcy says, picking the monkey wrench up off the next workbench over, thankful, despite everything, for their time in captivity. Without it, she wouldn't have had the first fucking clue what a monkey wrench even is. She hands it over. "I also want a cupcake factory. My dreams don't really have that habit of coming through."

"You really want one," Tony says, taking the tool out of her hand and bending over his tiny collection of steel and stuff. "You give me business plans and projections, make it all realistic and doable, and I'll give you the startup money."

"Loan?" she asks, because while it's never really been so much of a dream of hers as a pet thought, it's still nice to know the parameters.

"No," he says. "You present me with something realistic, and it'll be a gift. I'll buy shares too."

Darcy blinks, frowns, because, well, who the fuck would even do that? Except this is Tony and all she smells from him is pack, and if she's honest, that's all she's ever smelled. Even before everyone began pointing out their resemblance, that was still the dominant thing. It's why she trusted him within moments of meeting him. It's why she never challenged him. It is, she realizes, the main reason why she's never found him attractive. "Tony," she says, because as much as she doesn't want to push him, doesn't want to get on his nerves, she needs this, needs the answers he's holding hostage. "What are you to me?"

Tony doesn't speak for several incredibly long minutes. He keeps working, though, carefully inserting whatever it is he's putting in before pulling down the goggles and starting in on the soldering. He keeps working, not a word escaping him, and Darcy is pretty damn sure that's utterly unnatural. Still, she leaves him be. She likes to think she knows when to push and when not to. "It really was a horrible December," he says at last, without seeming to ever once take his attention off his work. Abruptly, he turns to face her, and his eyes are painfully soft. "Jesus," he says, swallowing audibly. "You're perfect. You're so fucking perfect. Even better than I thought you'd be. God. You're incredible. Never let anyone tell you otherwise."

And suddenly, Darcy's eyes begin to sting, and she's hiccupping. Her chest is tight and something inside her damn near hurts even as she can't stop smiling, some instinct-driven part of her prouder and happier than she's ever been her whole damn life. It takes what feels like ages before she can actually speak, just giddy and happy and oddly full now, standing in front of him and clasping his biceps. Her fingers don't even come close to reaching as far as halfway around. "I know how that goes," she says, deciding to leave the last bits alone, because she doesn't really know what to do with praise and she's not sure Tony would know what to do with a response anyway. Also, giving him some encouragement rather than drenching him in feels is probably the best route if she wants actual answers, especially after the kind of stuff he just said. "My mom died in December." The hilarity and light atmosphere have dispersed like they were never there to begin with. There's weight here, suddenly, some kind of brutal gravity that she'd hate except right now she fucking needs it. "Who are you _to me_ , Tony, please?"

Tony lets out a drawn out groan. "Mine too," he says. "But that's... That Christmas." He stops abruptly, turns his attention back to the half-assembled stuff in front of him.

"Tony," Darcy says, and it comes out softer than she intended, but then that shouldn't really be that much of a surprise. She can scent his distress, how hard this is for him, can pick up every bit of fear and panic and pain and anger that seems to be suddenly permeating the air.

"Like I told you, I was stupidly desperate to get Howard's attention, even if it meant doing every single thing that I knew would piss him off. I partied a lot, spent a hell of a lot of his money on booze and drugs and stupid stuff, and he didn't give a fuck. I was an idiot kid, you know."

She can damn near feel the way he's hesitating, can very definitely smell it, the way he wants and doesn't want to tell, the way he wants to keep himself contained more tightly than a Swiss bank vault even while she can scent the desperation for a pack bond on him. And there's so much else, so much detail, so many complexities, and she isn't sure could ever possibly put it all into words even if she tried. "You won't lose me," she says, and that is instinct talking, because she never consciously chooses to speak those words, isn't sure why they come out at all. Still, "Not ever," is somehow the next thing that makes it out. Darcy swallows, seeks out the nearest liquor cabinet, because she can fucking smell him aching for it. She pulls out a random bottle and pours it into the first the best tumbler she can find. It seems only vaguely dirty, which, thank fuck, she isn't actually trying to give him food poisoning.

Tony snatches up the tumbler, downs it in one quick move. "It was the dumbest fucking decision I ever made," Tony says. "I never thought it through at all. I just wanted to piss him the fuck off, and the only thing worse than having an alpha son would be having a son who was an alpha bitch. I never planned for it to be permanent. My, admittedly vague, plan was to keep up the change for long enough that he'd have to accept it and begin to try to find some dog for me who'd take over the company and run my whole fucking life, and then I'd change my mind and turn back to dog." He grimaces. "I wasn't really old enough for any of this. No one sane and legal would've sold me the hormones. Honestly, we're back in the eighties here, so there probably wasn't a legal way at all, aside from the old-fashioned way, and I wasn't going to put myself through that shit. Anyway." He shrugs, stops talking for so long she almost thinks he's going to clam up all over again. She refills his tumbler, hopes for the best. "Artificial hormones are the worst," he says then. "They were so damn painful I made myself black out more times than I can count. Half the time I didn't even think it would work, but then I'd feel this piercing pain in my gut or this ache in my hips, or realize the glands in my mouth and neck were swelling just a bit. I should've stopped. Would've, probably, except I wanted Howard to look at me even one single fucking time with his full focus, and I was becoming more and more certain that would never happen unless I pissed him off in the worst possible way. Whatever politics he played, he never did like male alpha bitches."

Darcy swallows, looks at him more closely and tries not to see the old pain in his eyes, the way his knuckles are white where he's clenching his tools painfully tight. "So you kept taking them," she says, not a question so much as a weird subconscious summary of his words and the things she's beginning to realize he made himself go through.

"It was never meant to be permanent," Tony says. "Except the day when the change finally took, some bastard dog broke down the door. I was... fuck, I was so gone that any kind of relief felt like it would save me from going crazy. So, you know. No rape, no lack of consent or shit. I wanted it so badly it hurt. He was... I honestly don't remember that much. I went into immediate heat after changing, and that does a hell of a trick on your brain. He was maybe ten, fifteen years older than me. He was beautiful. I remember that much, even if the actual details of things are so fucking hazy I can't--" He stops, groans, runs a hand over his face. "You kind of look like him a bit," he says. "Same color eyes, same color skin. His mouth. I think. Maybe. Fuck."

Darcy swallows, tries to slot all this new information together in her head, but it's difficult when the air's drenched in the scent of his distress, his self-consciousness, his fucking clear-as-day fear, though she can't tell what it is he's so scared of. "So you're saying you're not my father," she says slowly. "Because he is."

Tony grimaces, looks off to the side. He returns to his tinkering, turning his back. Darcy lets him. It's probably easier like this, if she gives him the chance to retreat, at least a bit. "He is," he confirms. "He... We slept together, obviously. Bitch in heat, dog dropping in, you know the drill. I was so far gone I thought it would kill me not to let him have me. I--" He stops, shoulders hunching. "It would've been fine, except at the end of it, he bit me." He lets out a sharp breath. "He bit me, and everything changed. Suddenly, that whole thing wasn't just a prank to get Howard's attention, it was... It was real, too fucking real. When it was all over, I wasn't sure what was a dream and what wasn't, but I had a bonding mark, so." He shrugs. "No turning back, you know. Also, the fucking bastard left after just one round, which kind of just made everything hurt worse."

"I'm sorry," she says, because she _is_. Well, not about the sex, not really, because she's beginning to think she has to feel very strongly about the sex he keeps alluding to because, well, without it she kind of thinks she may not have even existed in the first place. "That must... Bonding at that age and without even knowing..." She winces, fairly sure she's only making this worse. "Hard as fuck. Sorry."

He shrugs. "It kind of had to take a backseat," he says. "I was barely even halfway out of the heat by the time Rhodey broke my fucking door down. Apparently, Obie had been trying to call me and for pretty obvious reasons, I never answered. So, eventually, Obie called Rhodey instead. Turned out my parents had been in a car crash while I was in the grips of my first heat. They both died. It was... I felt like utter trash. I'd done who the fuck even knows what to my body, and Howard was just... He was gone. He was never going to stand there and look at me for minutes straight and give me the dressing down of my life. And Mamá..." He actually seems to choke on his words for a moment. "Sorry," he says. "Anyway, the whole bitch thing, I kind of pushed it to the back of my mind. There was a funeral to arrange, and then there was an R&D to head up. I wasn't going to inherit the company until I turned twenty-one, but that didn't mean I didn't have my hands full. And I still had to get my masters and doctorates and shit too."

"So what happened then?" Darcy asks, and she does want to know, sucked in completely despite how clinical he's being, despite the wealth of detail he's leaving out. She gets it. Some things are too painful to color in completely. And, frankly, she isn't processing yet, not at all. She's trying to think and not think all at once, trying to take in Tony's words without having to respond to them in any emotional kind of way. Because if she has to do emotions here, fuck. She tries not to imagine Tony, as a fucking teenager, abandoned and neglected, just wanting his asshole father's attention, taking hormones he never should've touched, going into a heat he wasn't prepared for, some asshole dog breaking down his door and... No, she can't. She doesn't want this to be where she came from, doesn't want this kind of history sitting on her shoulders.

"I was so damn busy I kind of just wrote off the whole being sick thing to stress," Tony says. "Got away with it too until the summer holiday after my graduation, when Jarvis took all of two days to notice and took me to the doctor. You've probably guessed by now that I was a little bit pregnant," Tony says, shrugging it off like it doesn't matter. His shoulders remain all too stiff. "In my defense, I never would've considered an abortion even if I hadn't been an alpha. I just... I may not exactly have the makings of a father, and I know that I can be an unfeeling bastard at the best of times, but I couldn't have--" He stops, makes an attempt at soldering something or other, but his hands aren't steady enough. He burns himself, drops the blowtorch and has to put his hand under the cold tap. "I was already showing, you know. I thought it was all alcohol and stress. And yeah, I had been drinking. Been drinking a hell of a lot. Sorry about that." He slumps a bit more, back bunching up in a huge sigh. "So fucking sorry, if you ever had to feel the consequences of that."

"I'm fine," Darcy says. "Always fine. I was never sick a day in my life. No fetal alcohol syndrome or any kind of shit here. I was always the healthiest person I knew. I broke my arm once, you know, when I was five or something. I cut my cast off a couple of weeks later because I hated not being able to use the arm. When my parents took me in to get my cast redone, they took the X-rays again, didn't even believe I was the same patient. I'd healed up completely. So, healthy. Very healthy. More than healthy."

Tony throws her a smile over his shoulder, slow and awkward and hesitant, but there. "I'm glad to hear it," he says. "I never..." He swallows again before turning away once more. "I never meant to hurt you. I just didn't know any better. I just." He stops again, turns back to focus utterly on his work. "Sorry," he says. "Anyway, Jarvis magicked up some nondisclosure agreement for the doctor, wrote up the letter for MIT to explain why I wouldn't be there for the beginning of the semester for my post-graduate. I think he said I was in rehab or something, which, really, not all that creative. Or unbelievable. Anyway, I stayed home. Anna and Jarvis were there. Perfect omega couple for that sort of thing. One or the other of them was always there, never left my side. They were both there when I had you. Then Jarvis wrapped you up and took you away, like we'd agreed. Anna stayed with me, held me after while I sobbed through the night like a fucking baby, my body telling me there should be a pup and I should be entering the denning haze. You were born on the fifth, by the way. Not the sixth. Pretty close to midnight, but still, they got that one wrong. I went back to school a month later. My doctor died last year. Only person alive who even knows is Rhodey."

Darcy breathes in, and now that she knows, there's no way in hell she can not detect the artificial edges of his dog scent, can not detect the bitch underneath. And he's open and vulnerable and looks almost the same age he must've been when this all happened, and Darcy wants to comfort him so badly, wants to tell him everything will be all right, _they'll_ be all right, but she can't. She... However much she wants to, she just can't. "I need to go," she says, and she doesn't stop to register his resigned nod or even the choked back sob he lets out as the lab doors close behind her. She leaves the building as fast as she can, flags down a cab and tells the driver to take her to Dad's nursery home, because, fuck, where the hell else is she supposed to go right now?

***

"Darcy," Dad says the moment she walks through his door, and Darcy could've sobbed with relief, because he _remembers_ her, and he's clear-eyed and out of his bed, holding out his shaking arms for her. She sinks into them with no questions asked, biting back her own sob. "Darling," he says against her hair, feeling so damn fragile against her it makes for something close to a physical pain. "What's eating you?"

"What if--" She pauses, swallows. "What if I found one of my biological parents?"

His wrinkled face tucks into a grin. His near blind eyes try and try again to focus on her. "All I want for you, Honey," he says then. "All I want is for you not to be alone. I know you have Jane and these Erik and Thor characters. But that's not family, not really. I'd give anything to know you'll still have family left when I go."

"What if he's a messed up male alpha bitch who changed his sex when he was sixteen to piss off his dad and was raped by a dog on the night of his first heat?" she says.

"Then I can finally understand why someone might give up on a pup as perfect as you," Dad says. "I never got it, you know. Why an alpha bitch could possibly give you up. A recently turned teenage male bitch... Actually makes sense. I'm glad we got you, glad we got to love you. Glad he got to live out his life, the poor kid."

She has to say it, can't not say it when she knows how much it'll mean to him. "It's Tony Carbonell," she says. "That my... my bio mom, or whatever you're supposed to say. María Carbonell's kid, you know. It's... He. He gets me, actually. No one ever gets me. It's. It's incredible, Dad. I hope. I hope this is okay with you."

His face tucks into a smile, but suddenly his eyes are so far off, so distant she knows there's no way in hell she's ever going to reach him. "Just want you to be happy, Sweetheart," he says, staring off into nothing. "Just want you to be okay. Darcy Carbonell. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it, Lizzie?" He flashes a smile at his empty side. "Doesn't it?" His features tighten, and suddenly he's glaring at the whole world. "Doesn't it?" he asks, throwing his radio clock. Darcy, practiced already, steps out of the way. "Doesn't it, Lizzie? Lizzie? Lizzie!"

A nurse shoos Darcy out of the room before she has to witness Dad restrained and rambling anymore than she already has. Chest tight, she makes her way out of the building, heading back towards the Tower and feeling like an absolute asshole. Because she loves her parents, honestly does and always will, but the idea of someone so like her she can barely feel the edges between them, someone young enough to seem fucking invincible... Right now, that's exactly the kind of parent she needs. If that's possible. If walking out on him hasn't wrecked things too badly.

***

Of course, Tony isn't going to make things easy for her. She returns to the Tower and heads down to the workshop only to find that the door is shut and locked and absolutely refuses to budge. "I'm sorry, Miss," JARVIS says from the closest available speaker. "Sir has initiated the Total Blackout Procedure. Nothing short of a life-threatening situation will shut it down." That's kind of irresponsible, isn't it? Hasn't he been trying to pick up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s slack or something? She sighs. He can probably control that whole thing from down here anyway, which means she's just being petty and nitpicky because she isn't getting what she wants.

"What constitutes life-threatening?" she asks, then sighs. "Let me know if he comes out, will you?" she says, and turns around, walks away, feeling annoyed and let down and guilty all at once. She shouldn't have walked out like that. She knows, without quite knowing how she knows, that Tony is a lot more vulnerable than he lets on. Sharing a history only one other person knows of, laying bare everything about himself that he's kept hidden... And she just walked out on him. Yeah, she probably wouldn't be too happy with her in his situation either. Except, some bratty part of her says, he's supposed to be the adult, the parent. But he's not, is he? They may be biologically linked, but he was too young to take care of her. He gave her up, probably because it was the best thing he knew how to do for her. And it was a good thing. She loves the life she's had, the childhood she got to enjoy, the parents who loved her to death. She got to have them. How does she have a right to Tony as well? Thinking of him as her parent, she's pretty sure, isn't going to work out too well for either one of them. They are still family, though. Every bit of pack sense she's got is screaming that fact out at her. So maybe it has to be more equal, rather than just her demanding stuff. He's not Dad. Or Mom. Which means that as things stand, she's hurt him and she's going to have to find some way to make up for it, just as soon as he's halfway comfortable facing her again.

She damn near runs into Barton, too absorbed in her own thoughts to pay attention to where she's going. "Hey," he says, reaching out to steady her. "What's wrong? Stark lock you out?" Her expression must've been enough of an answer, because he grimaces, pats her shoulder jerkily. "He does that sometimes," he says. "It's not that he... I think he just gets overwhelmed sometimes, you know. He's this. Sometimes I think he's kind of bipolar. Manic one moment and hiding depression in alcohol and inventing the next day. Just. Give him time. Whatever happened, it's going to be just fine."

And Darcy swallows, can't meet his eyes, because he's probably fucking right. What happened to Tony back in the year or so surrounding her birth would've been enough to break anyone, let alone a lost, orphaned and already abandoned teenager. And that's without taking the broken denning haze into consideration. That's been known to take an extreme psychological toll on bitches, or so Mom's told her. Let alone the fact that he must be living every day with a half-fractured bond that will never leave entirely but is also just estranged enough that it must be fraying at the edges of his pack senses. If he isn't entirely all right, that's pretty much to be expected, really. She just needs to remember to keep that in mind, needs to remember to keep his feelings and responses in mind and not just her own. Not push so hard, make sure she's always going to stay for the fallout. She can do that. It might not be what she's ever vaguely expected from meeting one of her bio parents. But that's just it. Tony isn't her dad. She can't keep expecting him to be the mature, balanced one, can't demand that from him when she knows the reason she didn't grow up with him. "He's... damaged," she hears herself say, and she's pretty sure she shouldn't be revealing nearly this much. "I just didn't realize how much."

Barton shrugs. "'Damaged' is pretty much a requirement for admission into this Tower," he says. "Tony's just... Confusing. High-functioning one moment, all skittish and depressed the next. Just. He's softer than he looks, and if my theories on where you came from are right, then you're going to need to be extra careful. He probably thinks he's failed you already."

Darcy swallows down the sudden lump in her throat because, well, fuck, the pack bond's already settled enough that the thought of Tony in pain is damn near physically painful. If he's in pain because of her... She doesn't want to even think about that. "He hasn't failed me yet," she says. She turns her gaze towards the nearest camera. "You catch that, JARVIS? Let Tony have a recording if he gives you an opening."

"Certainly, Miss," JARVIS says, and if crisp, electronic, British notes could sound fond, she'd almost says that's what he sounds like right now.

Barton throws an arm around her shoulders. "Come on," he says. "I'd know the Stark-needs-a-shot-of-something-strong look anywhere, and you're projecting it all over the place. I know where he keeps the good stuff."

Darcy lets herself be led. A drink would be damn good right around now.

***

When Tony finally comes back up for air, it's been close to a week and apparently he only reappears because Cap and his 'merry band of musketeers' (Darcy's pretty sure Tony's got his references confused here) need to be picked up somewhere in Mexico. Darcy, just barely, manages to get onto the quinjet before it takes off, trying very hard to project the air of someone who's supposed to be here. "I'm sorry," she says finally, when they're speeding away somewhere above Texas or Indiana or something. "I wasn't trying to-- I wasn't running away. I just needed to. I went to see my dad. He's ecstatic, you know. That you're here. And, well, he's an utter María Carbonell fanboy, so he definitely loved that bit as well. Just. I wasn't trying to get away from you. I just. I needed his blessing, you know?"

Tony keeps the faceplate down when he turns his face towards her. "It's all right," he says. "I know I let you down. You honestly reacted better than I'd have ever expected."

Darcy flinches, because what is a worse reaction than running away when you can hear someone sobbing behind you? "You didn't let me down," she says. "You did the best you could with a shitty situation. I'm not saying I appreciate the fire station, but I get why you couldn't have your name on record, and it all turned out for the best. They placed me with incredible parents, you know."

"I know," he says, and when her eyebrows furrow, his metallic shoulders rise in a shrug. "What, you think I never checked up on you? Internet was just good enough for me to get a glimpse of your first day of school, you know." His mechanical cough somehow emits just as many feelings as his real voice would've. "Drank myself into a stupor that day. Made myself stop watching around the time you were ten, because it just felt like I was making everything worse. Also, I felt like an utter creep. That's why I didn't recognize you on sight."

Darcy winces, because as much as she might not want to, she can imagine him like that, staring at screens of his baby girl - and fuck, is that a weird thought? - and needing to drown it all out. It doesn't feel creepy, though. It's oddly reassuring. He isn't anywhere near as callous as he makes himself out to be. What must it have done to him to have given her up in the first place? Nothing good, she imagines. As much of a disaster as a kiddie her with a barely-more-than-kiddie Tony might've been, she can't even imagine what he must've felt, hates herself a little bit for never taking that into consideration. Darcy doesn't want kids, hasn't ever wanted kids, but at the same time she can still almost imagine what it must be like to have one and then abruptly give it up. The thought alone is enough to hurt. He went through that. He is vulnerable to her. He is damaged enough that he should come with a 'handle with care' label. She needs to keep this in mind, constantly, or she's going to mess up again. "Thank you," she finally manages.

He shrugs. "For checking up on you or for stopping?" he asks. Then he shrugs at his own question, breathes in. It's audible even in the armor "Your hormones are all out of whack," he says.

She shrugs back. "That's what tends to happen when you have to go more than a week without taking your daily dose of suppressants," she says. "Didn't exactly have a supply on me when we got snagged." She breathes in in turn, and maybe it's the armor muffling everything, but she's smelling even less bitch on him than before. "How come your hormones _aren't_ all out of whack?"

He holds up one hand, then retracts the gauntlet up to somewhere halfway up his forearm, revealing an innocuous-looking leather bracelet of the kind you could buy in any tourist destination around the world. He turns his hand, reveals the slightly bulkier underside to it where it almost looks like a tube's been hidden. "Emergency stash," he says. "Holds three tablets, each one lasts around forty-five days. They're the old-school stuff. Don't just control heat, actually suppress all bitch hormone production for that amount of time." He lowers his hand, lets the armor cover it again. "I hate taking it, makes me feel sick as shit for ages after, but it is effective." He sucks in a breath. "And you're welcome, whatever that 'thank you' was for. I don't know how you think I did anywhere near enough, but--"

"Stop," she says. "You... It hurt you, I know, but you let me go to an absolutely perfect couple, and I had a wonderful childhood, like your stalking probably showed you. There's nothing for you to apologize for. You know as well as I do that at that time, we'd have just screwed each other up."

Tony lets out a long breath. "Thank you," he says, and he sounds sincere, not a hint of sarcasm in his voice. "That actually. That helps. I mean, I watched." He actually has the decency to look chagrined for a moment, or as chagrined as an expressionless metal suit of armor can look. "But that doesn't mean I knew exactly what was going on. I'm glad you were happy."

Darcy flashes him a small smile before forcing herself to get back to her curiosity, the things she still needs to understand to get anything like a full picture. "How do you have a healing factor?"

She wishes to God she could see his face when for long moments all he does is give her another exaggerated shrug. "Born normal," he says. "No X-gene, no super powers. Aged normally too, at first. Then there was the bonding, and after that..." He gives another shrug. "I didn't need a daily shave until my late twenties, which was when I grew out the beard. No one was taking me seriously and I still looked about twenty, the beard was a must." She guesses that behind the mask he's giving a wry press grin, and she's almost grateful she can't see it. "Haven't been sick since. Well, normal sick. In the cave, I healed from having a car battery stuck in my chest within days, no infections, and it was a grubby as hell environment. I think that's when it really hit me, that I do have a healing factor. Mark II wasn't exactly perfect. I had You take the bullets out after the first mission, before Pepper could see, and that's without even talking about the test flight incidents. I healed up after having my sternum reinserted and the arc reactor taken out in less than a week. It was just..." Yet another shrug, and they're beginning to get annoying even as she's grateful for them since they're about the only expression of emotion the suit is actually capable of. 

"I figure it's him," he says at last. "He must be a mutant of some kind, whoever he is. Something like that. No other reason why a baseline human would have a healing factor nearly as good as Captain America's, and not really age more than a handful of years in two and a half decades. Bonds are funny things, you know. They want the mates to have as many years together as possible, so the weaker one gets linked to the health of the stronger one. Still, I don't know. Not a lot of case studies of baseline humans mated with mutants."

Darcy swallows. "I think I got it too," she says. "Never sick a day in my life, like I said. If I get hurt, I heal from it so damn fast everyone thinks I was just being hypochondriac in the first place." It's kind of scary, really, to learn anything about the bio parent her subconscious has already designated as unsafe. The guy she might owe her existence to, but who raped a messed up kid to get there, heat and rut and all that shit besides the point, and then abandoned him just like everyone else already had. There's a part of her that hates him already even while she can't let the emotion drive her completely because, hello, who wouldn't be grateful to exist. Still, she doesn't actually want to know more about him, more about what she got from him. To be perfectly honest, she'd prefer to have nothing of his at all. Be all a mix of Tony-nature and Mom-and-Dad-nurture, that would be perfectly fine with her. She knows that's not how things work, though. She'd just really rather prefer not to have to think about it.

"Tell me about it," Tony says, letting out an electronic groan. "One day I'm reckless and deeply hurt, and the next I'm a messed up hypochondriac who paid people off to fake my medical records or something, which, what? How does that even make sense?" He sighs, audible through his faceplate. "I just--"

"We're coming in for the landing," Barton says through the speaker system, cutting Tony off, and this time Darcy's nearly grateful. He's given her enough fodder that she's going to be processing for days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am going with the shorter but quicker format right now, so each part will be closer to 5K than 10K, but hopefully updates will come faster. Any further opinions on this, please let me know.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone for kudos, bookmarks, subscriptions and, especially, the comments, which never fail to make me think and smile and get right back to writing.
> 
> (Someone asked me in one of the other stories whether I have a tumblr, sad to say I do not. You can pick one of these reasons for yourself: A) I am too damn old for that shit, B) Too many people over thirty around, or C) I seriously do not need more accounts in my life to maintain.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First up, yes, I know that Latveria isn't part of the Baltics, but actually closer to Romania or something. I'm deliberately taking liberties here because, seriously, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Latveria. If that country('s name) ever belonged anywhere, it was in the Baltics. Sorry to purists, but I'm not very much a comic person, and my headcanon, for ages before actually looking it up, was that Latveria was in the Baltics. So, in this story at least, it's going to be.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to Potrix for the quick and entertaining beta.

The extraction is about as uneventful as the most boring thing she could've imagined. They land. Captain America, Black Widow and New Guy all board the quinjet. They take right back off. "Well, that was anticlimactic," Tony says, neatly summing up Darcy's own thoughts.

"It really was," New Guy says. "We chased the guy all over Latin America, but we haven't got a blip since Argentina. A bit of chasing breadcrumbs and stuff, but nothing solid since then. He's disappeared completely."

"Seriously?" Tony says. "That's what you've been doing these past couple of weeks? Following crumb trails? You know the whole point of those in Hansel and Gretel is that they were impossible to follow because the birds ate them up? And that's what you've been doing while the world's been falling apart? Do you have any idea what--" He stops, sucks in a deep breath, and suddenly this whole thing is a whole lot less funny, because even though he's in his armor, Darcy can tell he's on the verge of losing it. "You're some of our most valuable resources, and you've been wasting all of that on one vanishing act. And yeah, sure, Barnes is great and all, his care packages are the best, but seriously? It's all I can do to hold shit together. You can't just..."

"Tony," Captain America says. He's pulled his cowl back and he barely looks more than a few years older than Darcy. "I'm sorry. I didn't-- I thought this would take a few days, tops. I didn't mean to blow up the world and leave you to handle the fallout."

"Yeah, well," Tony says. "That's what you did."

"Listen," New Guy says. "I don't mean to be rude, but..." He inclines his head towards her, and now that his goggles are up he just looks kind of silly. Hot as hell, but silly. Then again, he looked silly with the goggles down too. "Who is she?"

"Thor's girlfriend's research assistant," Captain America says. His eyes fix blearily on Darcy. "What are you doing here?"

Darcy shrugs. "Tony was being an asshole," she says. "A quinjet seemed as good a place as any to corner him."

"Hey," Tony says. "I was not being an asshole. I just have... Intimacy issues." And sad as it is, that's pretty much the summary of it all, because he's right. Whatever he may act like, he isn't an asshole, not really, and he's spot on about the intimacy issues.

New Guy cocks an eyebrow. "Stark couldn't get it up?" he asks, and Darcy is so revolted she damn near pukes on the floor. Judging by the sounds emanating from the suit, Stark isn't much better off.

"Ew," Darcy says. "That's wrong and disgusting. I would never--"

"I'd never," Tony says at the same time. "Ew, that is so wrong you don't even--"

"--sleep with him," Darcy continues, used to Tony talking over her by now and forging through anyhow. "That is just wrong on so many levels. I don't do--"

"--know," Tony says. "Never in a million years would I ever once consider... Ugh, God, that is so wrong, I don't do--"

"Incest," they both somehow manage to say all at the same time.

Three sets of eyes blink at them. Black Widow seems to gather herself up the fastest. "Stark," she says. "What did you do now?"

"Not so much now as what I did twenty-five years ago," Tony says, giving a shrug that might've passed as nonchalant for someone who didn't know him.

"Darcy is Tony's daughter," Barton shouts from the cockpit. "It really is that simple and yes, there really are two of them. Now shut up, we just got a call from Hill. Apparently Latveria's having trouble."

Tony's head cocks a bit to the side in what Darcy's pretty sure would be a frown if she could see his face. "Doom's asking for help?" he asks. "Doesn't he realize we don't like each other? I mean, sure, I'm not all that fond of Richards either, but I'm even less fond of Doom's shitty ass robots, and he doesn't have a hot brother-in-law I can fuck, so how the hell is he expecting help on this one?"

Darcy cocks an eyebrow. "You slept with the Human Torch?" she asks.

"Obviously." Tony's voice, even with the mechanical timbre, is damn near a drawl.

"He's like, my age," Darcy protests. "And he looks like Captain America. Ew, Tony, fuck that, don't do that to me. God."

"He's as hot as Cap," Tony agrees. "But he's not a ninety-six years old grandpa, and he doesn't act like the sum of all morals and judgement. Plus, he's a good damn fuck."

"I'm guessing this is exactly how you know all superhero teams out there," Black Widow mutters, pretty much under her breath, but not so low that no one picks up on it.

Tony shrugs again, and Darcy can damn near see him pulling on the genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist cloak, huddling into it and hiding himself within its depths. Honestly, she wouldn't be surprised if Tony mainly knew Richards and just slept with Storm because, well, hot easy pickings, but he isn't about to let that out, is he? For whatever reason, 'slut', to Tony, is something to hide behind. Darcy fucking hates it. Not because she's embarrassed that he's been around the block once or twice, but because he is so much more than that, and she hates the way he hides that from everyone.

Captain America seems utterly out of commission, cheeks pink and eyes downcast, which probably means he's at least seen pictures of Johnny Storm. Not that that helps the situation, exactly. And ugh, Darcy's pretty sure she's the one who derailed the conversation, which, oops? Fuck, she does not have the focus necessary for this whole superhero gig thingie.

"Doom says," Barton continues, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully and loudly enough that with the speakers on all over the cabin, it's damn near painful, "That he's uncovered four HYDRA cells all over the Baltic, and while he's dealing with the two in Latveria, and an unknown force is taking care of the one in Latvia, the one in Lithuania is wide open, and he figures we have a common enemy."

"Set the course, then," Captain America says, and he sounds oddly resigned. "Doom's Doom, but we can't just let a base go because he's an asshole."

"Copy, Cap," Barton says, and then the floor angle changes for a moment as their course is set.

***

They touch down in Lithuania just of a couple of hours later. Tense hours, where it feels like all that's been happening has been Tony and Darcy on one side and the three stooges on the other, all of them sizing each other up. It's almost a relief when the quinjet lands and everyone leaves, Tony ordering her to stay behind with Cap backing him up. So Darcy stays, no matter how much it pisses her off.

Black Widow's gone ahead to get the lay of the land, according to the comms, and New Guy is apparently less obvious than Iron Man, so he is the one getting them up to date on the bird's eye point of view. There's actually silence for a while, and then Captain America suddenly says, "Wait, what's this about care packages?"

"Well," Stark says. "It's actually care _package_ , singular. Sorry I made that kind of murky."

"He brought us food in Argentina," Darcy supplies. "And water. And wine and cigarettes, which I'm still kind of scratching my head about, not that the whole thing wasn't already weird in and of itself."

"Why would he--" Captain America cuts himself off with some kind of frustrated groan. "Widow, Falcon, anything?"

"Looks like a regular minimalist base," Black Widow says. "Bunker built into the ground. Doesn't show a lot of signs of troop movement, so probably operates with a skeleton staff. We shouldn't have any trouble here, Cap."

"Need a hand?" Barton asks from where he's still seated in the cockpit. He sounds almost hopeful about it.

"No," Captain America says. "Just keep the jet idling, Hawkeye. We need an escape route if things go bad." A small pause, then, as if he needs those few seconds to assess the situation. "Falcon, you stay on surveillance and perimeter security. Widow, try to infiltrate. Iron Man and I will follow in five for the all out attack. Iron Man, get to the south entrance."

A variety of agreements sound over the comms, and Darcy sighs, bored, and shifts in her seat. She knows she would only be in the way out there, but still, this is fucking boring, and it's pissing her the fuck off. "Hey," she asks, knowing only Hawkeye will hear her. She's patched up to the comms, but she wasn't given a mic. "As the cool twenty-something daughter, isn't it my duty to find him a date? Captain America a good choice?"

Barton chokes on a laugh. "Hell no," he says. "They'd kill each other in a week, if they managed to last that long."

"What was that, Hawkeye?" Captain America's voice asks over the comms.

"Sorry, Cap," Hawkeye says. "Just talking with Darcy. We'll get off the comms system now."

"Well," Darcy says. "Tony's at least physically attracted, as evidenced by Johnny Storm, and Captain America was blushing all over the place."

"Storm is like Cap with Tony's personality and a fraction of his intelligence," Barton says. "So, basically, the airhead blond bimbo, which is Stark's baseline go-to kind of girl. Or guy, in this case. For one-night stands. And trust me, a one-night stand between Cap and Iron Man would not go over well, for any of us. If you do want to set yourself up as your daddy's dating service, better rethink your first choice."

Darcy grimaces. He's probably right about that, as much as she'd prefer not to have to admit it. "He's not my daddy," she says then. "I've already got a dad, thanks very much."

"Yeah, well," Barton says. "Why are you so interested in getting Stark auctioned off, anyway?"

Darcy grimaces. "He should be happier," she says. "Also, he kind of sucks at taking care of himself."

She can almost see Barton's grin. "Ain't that the truth." A short pause, then, "You won't want Cap on that, though. He's almost as bad, and his cooking sucks nearly as much. Pure beta there, not that I'm one to talk. For Stark, you'll want an omega or another alpha, though." He pauses. "Actually, no omega. Alpha, definitely. He needs someone who'll stand up to him."

Darcy lets out a long groan. "Maybe I should just fucking recruit Barnes," she says. "His care packages are the best. Also, damn, I didn't realize you were this insightful."

Before Barton can reply, Captain America is saying something or other, Barton's turning his mic back on and everything's happening too damn quickly for Darcy to follow, everyone spewing technical bullshit she doesn't understand and moving too fast to follow. "Copy, Cap," Barton is saying next, and then. "Iron Man, did you copy? Iron Man? Iron Man, come in."

Darcy feels her gut tighten in fear because, fuck, she's already lost her mom, and her dad's so close to gone she can feel it. She cannot lose Tony too, she cannot. God dammit. She isn't supposed to get this attached, this quick. She never does. Except Tony isn't some random person. He's _Tony_. He's her... her Tony. "Is he all right?" she hears herself croak out. "Is he--"

"Hold your horses, Baby Stark," Barton says. "Your daddy's survived worse. Cap, status? Need a hand?"

"No, it's--" Captain America cuts off as a new voice comes down through the comms system.

New Voice says, "Stark's fine, just out cold. Could do with a med evac. I'll do cover until someone handles the extraction, and then I'm blowin' this place sky high."

"Bucky," Captain America breathes.

"Cap," Black Widow says. "Head in the game. Barnes, I'll be there in two minutes."

No one says anything for several long, tense moments, and fuck, Darcy wants in there, would've gone already if not for the fact that she knows she'd be more of a hindrance than a help. More than anything, she wants Tony right the fuck here, where she can see him, can feel his pulse, can make sure he's all right. Fuck all, she wishes Tony had finished that taser for her.

"I've got Stark," Widow says, half an eternity later. "He's breathing, pulse steady, but he's unconscious. No sign of Barnes. I'll need help to extract. Don't need back-up at the moment, though, and Iron Man appears stable."

"Be there in a moment, Widow," Captain America says. "I just need to finish off these assholes."

"Language, Cap," Tony croaks, and Darcy breathes a sigh of relief and fuck, how long has she even been holding that breath?

"Good to hear your voice, Iron Man," Barton says from the cockpit. "I say that with the reservation that I'll be sick of it again in a minute or two, but fuck, glad to have you back."

"Good to hear you too, Merida," Tony says, and Darcy feels her shoulders fall out of the tense stance she's been keeping them in. If he can be an asshole to Barton, he's going to be all right. That's just how this goes. Hopefully.

Several more, long, moments pass before everyone's giving the all clear. "Going to leave the goons for Doom to deal with," Captain America finally decides. "Without S.H.I.E.L.D..." He trails off. "Heading off to extract Iron Man and Black Widow."

"Copy," Barton says. "Everyone hear that?"

"Copy," New Guy says. "Heading in to assist."

And that's pretty much it. Moments later they're all back on the quinjet, the base exploding behind them. Darcy uses her override before Captain America manages to even begin to enunciate his own, and Tony's armor falls away, leaving him pale and panting. His eyes aren't quite focusing, but he's very clearly alive, very clearly still with them, and Darcy may or may not have let out a sob of relief at the visual confirmation. A concussion, a fucking concussion. From being jostled around in the armor, and it could've been so much worse, fucking idiot could've gotten himself killed, but for right now he's alive and marginally well, and Darcy can't quite keep herself from smacking a quick kiss to his whiskered cheek, relief rendering her ridiculously weak. "You are an asshole," she says.

Tony shrugs. "Barnes gave me another pack of cigarettes," he says. "Fuck knows why he wants me to keep smoking, but gift horses and mouths and all. Cap, you want to share?"

Everyone else objects, but it's halfhearted at best, and Barton keeps them low enough to keep the dock open as Tony and Captain America huddle together and pass a cigarette back and forth between them. "These don't taste at all the way they used to," Captain America comments. "Why is Bucky still smoking this shit? Hell, why did he show up at all?"

"He seems to like showing up when Tony's down shit creek," Darcy says. "Don't take that as a suggestion, though, please, either one of you. Damn near had a heart attack." She walks over and sits down on Tony's other side, takes the cigarette out of his fingers. "Sharing is caring."

Tony shrugs and lets her at it. "Grown woman," he says with a yet another shrug when New Guy looks at him askance. "Gave up parenting rights ages ago, blahblahblah. Besides, no room to moralize and all that shit." He takes the cigarette out of her grasp and takes a long drag before handing it back to Captain America and fucking hell, why are they three people sharing one cigarette when they could have one each? Not that it matters. It's weirdly cozy like this. Even if Captain America does hog it like crazy. Darcy shrugs and steals the cigarette back, taking a deep hit herself. Below her, the forests and plains and quaint cities of northern Northern Europe zoom by until they're on the fifth smoke and hitting the Atlantic Ocean. She's huddled into Tony's side, soaking up the comfort of his presence, the sheer knowledge that he's still here, still alive, still a solid, strong presence that's not about to fade anytime soon. She needs that, needs it from someone, even if he isn't ever going to be her parent.

"I just. I don't even get it," Captain America says. "Why would Bucky show up to help with the fight and keep Tony safe and then just vanish all over again? He obviously knows we're all on the same side."

Tony hums in reply, which probably means his head injury is catching up to him again.

Darcy shrugs. "I'm starting to think that Bucky Barnes just works in very mysterious ways," she says.

***

It's strange, how much more crowded the Tower suddenly seems, when Thor has already been taking up so much space. Not crowded in a bad way, obviously. Darcy might've grown up in a small family, but she's always thrived on crowds, on having people around her, constant company. Well, most of the time. Sometimes she wants a bit of solitude (and sometimes Black Widow is scary as fuck) and that's when she ends up back down in Tony's workshop.

Tony doesn't pay all the much attention to her most of the time, which might actually be why it's so comfortable. Not to get it wrong, Darcy likes attention. Craves it, much of the time, but sometimes it's nice to be able to just exist in someone else's space, and have private movie marathons on their couch while ignoring the bot bringing her snacks until that person collapses next to her and they can sit leaning against each other's sides, just silently watching move after movie. Today is not one of those times. "Widow wants me to spar with her," she shouts, and so what if she sounds a bit pathetic? She's fucking scared.

Tony hums along to the music. Then he jolts and turns to look at her. "What the actual fuck?" he asks. "That's-- That's, no. JARVIS, call Nat. Tell her picking on my kid isn't cool."

Darcy cocks an eyebrow. And okay, she'll never admit this, but there is something, some small spot deep in her chest, that goes kind of warm and happy at hearing him say 'my kid'. It shouldn't feel like that, because she isn't his kid. She's her parents' kid. But still, something somewhere inside her feels like she kind of belongs somewhere, maybe, and that's not something she's felt a lot since she signed the papers to sell the house so the money could cover Dad's care and her tuition. "Thank you," she shouts, and fuck, but she loves it down here, loves the way she can feel the beat of his cool-old-guy music through her feet and up her entire body, the way his bots are confusedly making their way through the space and attempting to do whatever he's told them to, the way the screens and holograms make her feel like she's walked into a cheesy sci-fi movie.

He flashes her a somewhat distracted grin. "Well," he says. He grimaces and makes a quick hand gesture. The volume of the music lowers drastically. "I've sparred with Nat. It wasn't fun. At all. It hurt, actually. And I get the feeling I'm supposed to at least try and protect you from that."

She flashes him a quick grin, knocks her shoulder against his bicep. He's not a big man, not especially tall either, but he's enough larger than her to feel strong and solid like this. Safe. "I was wondering what happened to my taser," she says.

Tony's face flashes through a series of expressions, ending in a grimace. "Well," he says. "I was going to build you a really good one. For self-defense shit, you know. Then I realized that if I built it too well you were just going to charge right into battle with the rest of us, which." He shudders. "But if I don't build it well enough, how are you going to protect yourself? So, I've kind of been working on that whole dilemma for a while."

Darcy blinks. "That's surprisingly honest of you," she says.

Tony shrugs, and he's close enough that she can feel the coiled strength of him. Fuck whoever says Tony's the weakest of the Avengers or that he's nothing without his suit. Even without it, he has more brawn than most people out there and brains anyone would envy. And fuck, what the hell is up with that bit of protectiveness? "I can do honest," he says.

"Someday," Darcy says. "It's not going to matter whether I'm prepared or not. Sometime they're going to come at you with something heavier than you can handle, and I'm going to come running whether I've got the equipment or not. I'm like you in that way, I think. So I'd really appreciate it if you'd give me the equipment to keep us both alive."

"I should just build you a fucking suit," Tony mutters, barely audible over the still very audible thrum of some obscure eighties hairband or other and fuck, people really are right when they say you keep listening to the music of their youth for the rest of your life. She doesn't like what this says about her and N'Sync. "Invade Wakanda or some shit, get enough vibranium to construct the whole thing out of it. Upholster the thing so you don't get jostled because, shit, that hurts. Don't worry," he adds. "I'd add firepower too. Could probably put a taser in there somewhere. Just... You know that's probably about the only way I'd ever let you into the fray."

Darcy makes an effort to neither sigh nor roll her eyes. "I'm going to quote the smartest idiot I know here," she says. "'Grown woman. Gave up parenting rights ages ago'. Give me a body armor and some good fucking tasers and I'll be fine."

The breath he sucks in damn near stutters in his throat. He looks away from her, making it impossible to read his expression. His muscles are tense against her side. Then he squares his shoulders. "JARVIS, tell Nat I'm sorry, and I overreacted. Set up daily training sessions for Darcy, rotate it between the available Avengers." He turns to her, and his face is uncharacteristically serious. "I'm not saying this as your... whatever." He grimaces at the word. "But as someone who's got actual experience in this line of work. I'll get Cap to back me if I need to. If you're serious about doing this, you'll need to last through a month of sparring with everyone here, Black Widow included. You do that, and I'll build you what you asked for. I'll still be the asshole keeping you as safe as I possibly can, but you're right. You're a grown woman, and I don't have any... parental rights to tell you what to do. But as a superior officer, or whatever, you're not getting so much as a toe in the pool until you're ready. They're not going to hold the punches on this."

Darcy flashes him a grin, tries not to show her apprehension. "Understood," she says, but can't help but add in a quick, mocking, "Sir."

"Christ," he says. "You're going to give me a heart attack. I really don't need that. They just finished fixing up my heart, you know."

She knocks her shoulder against his arm. "I know," she says. "Thanks, Tony."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who's left kudos, bookmarked or subscribed, and especially to those who commented. That is the highest form of thanks you can leave a writer.


	5. Chapter 5

A week later, the three stooges leave for another Barnes-Mitzion. They return four days later with absolutely zero results. Meanwhile Tony is hard at work on gear and SI and international intelligence and whatever other shit he's usually occupied with. Darcy does whatever she can to help him, until she thinks she might actually one day have a chance of keeping up with him. Then, when the stooges leave for a second time, and Thor goes back to Asgard for whatever fucked up reason, someone attacks New York again, and all that's left to fight the villain-du-jour is Hawkeye and Iron Man with the Hulk on a very risky backup. Darcy would've liked to slot herself in there as well, but she hasn't finished up her stupid sparring challenge, so there's no way Tony will even finish her designs yet, let alone let her out into the big, bad world.

The battle goes on, and it goes on and on, even after Hulk enters the fray. It goes on so long that Tony breaks his leg and heals it all over again and Hawkeyes is slurring his words over the comms and the Hulk seems in danger of turning back into Bruce out of sheer exhaustion. Darcy has called Captain America hours ago, and keeps calling him every few minutes, but he's out of fucking range, and Darcy is beginning to hyperventilate as she watches the feed, because, fuck, they're all on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. Even with JARVIS's help, Iron Man's movements are sluggish with exhaustion and fuck, this isn't how she wants to lose Tony. She never wants to lose him at all, and maybe the fact that he looks barely a day older than her has lulled her into some false sense of security or something, but fuck, she cannot lose his ass, not with her mom dead and her dad wasting away in a nursing home.

Just when it all seems to be over, the tide of the battle turns. The doom bots, which had seemed damn near silly at first and outright frightening the past few hours, begin to go down one by one. Sniper bullets, JARVIS informs her. Then Tony somehow manages to change armors in the middle of the fight, and he's back in control, and Darcy finally catches sight of their new support. She calls Captain America again. "Winter Soldier spotted in New York City," she says. "He's supporting the Avengers in a fight against Doom." Fucking ungrateful bastard, she can't help but think. Didn't they just help clear HYDRA out of the Baltics a few weeks back? Mostly, she thinks the idiot dictator has some kind of standing date with either Reed or Susan Storm that's resolved in a monthly fight or something, except the Fantastic Four, assholes that they are, are currently off-world. She'd have preferred them to be around right around now, even with the risk of being subjected to the train wreck that is Tony Stark and Johnny Storm.

She's torn away from her ponderings when first one and then a whole hell of a lot of bots somehow manage to attach themselves to the Iron Man armor, and then she's biting back a scream as they drag Tony towards the ground. Why they fuck does it always have to be him? Why does he always have to be the one to get hurt? Her heart's in her throat and her guts are a tangled, knotted mess and fuck, she can't. She can't lose Tony. She's established this, and fuck, if she knew some way to get him to give up Iron Man or at least take a fucking break, or... But that's not how it goes, is it? Tony Stark _is_ Iron Man. You can't make him give that up. Pepper Potts should be enough proof of that.

A storm of bullets detaches the first handful of bots, and then a blurry shape jumps off a building, entering the quickly falling fray. A metal arm glints as it grips a bot and tosses it into oblivion. Barnes is clinging onto Tony with his flesh arm, using his metal arm and the knife in his hand to fend off the enemy tech, dispatching the bots one by one at lightning speed while they plummet towards the ground at a speed no human, even one in a metal suit, could possibly survive. At fucking last, barely fifty feet off the ground, Barnes gets rid of the last bot and the Iron Man suit picks up the slack, repulsors engaging and taking them off at a near perfect curve towards the nearest rooftop. Barnes plants his feet on the Iron Man boots, wraps his metal arm around the neck of the armor and hangs on with more aplomb than someone who doesn't know Tony should've been able to. When they reach the rooftop, Winter Soldier hops off, limber as an acrobat, and Tony changes directions without a pause. Not a word is spoken. They are freakishly well coordinated for two people who haven't even actually been introduced.

The battle keeps going and fuck, does Doom even have a fucking life? Who the fuck makes this amount of robots while their life is actually in order? They're still fighting when the quinjet with the three stooges shows back up, not that there's much left by then. There's Banner passed out by a trashcan somewhere in Queens and there's Hawkeye on a rooftop covering the fight and Tony and Barnes fighting back-to-back on street level, still so fucking well-coordinated it's fucking scary. And then there's another dozen robots going at them, all seeming to coordinate in an attack on Tony, who goes down under the onslaught. Barnes goes fucking crazy. Still not so much as a word has been uttered, but Barnes charges in, all SM leathers and metal arm and eyes like fucking lightning, and fuck, maybe Darcy really should look into pimping Tony out to that guy, if they both survive this whole altercation. He might live longer that way.

The robots go flying, but by the time they're gone the Iron Man armor is prone on the ground with Winter Soldier standing over its battered remains, teeth pulled back in an utterly alpha snarl. And then the stooges are there, taking out the remains like it's fucking easy, like after sixteen hours' relentless fighting, they deserve to be the heroes. Tony's moved into med evac, and Captain America puts Winter Soldier in shackles, whispering apologies all the way, not that Darcy gives a shit. She's too busy watching Tony being loaded into an ambulance and shipped off to Stark Tower medical in an ambulance to attempt to read lips. The moment she knows for sure where they're going, she's off, dashing down the stairs and forgetting everything about the elevator, down and down and down until she reaches the medical floor, panting nearly as badly as she does after a fight with Black Widow.

She reaches the emergency room just about in time to watch Tony wake up and being totally out of it for long moments, huge anime eyes blinking open and his mouth slack with whatever drugs they've fed him. "What the fuck did you think you were doing?" she asks, barely resisting the urge to reach out and slap him.

"Saving the world," Tony slurs. "A-fucking-gain. Also, fucking hell, how does Doom not realize that when he owes us one, he _owes us one_? Fucking hell."

"Doom's an asshole," Darcy says, biting down the residual fear that still makes her whole damn body feel heavy. "That's not the thing, though. You got yourself in danger. You... Do you realize I was watching every step of the way? How the fuck could you do that to me?" She clenches her fists, barely keeps herself from punching him. "How the fuck could you do that, Jesus, do you know where I'd even be without you, Tony? I'd--"

Tony reaches out, somehow catches the edge of her shirt and pulls her close. "I don't know who _I'd_ be without _you_ ," he says, and his pupils are blown to hell, his eyes unfocused to a scary degree. He's either high on pain or drugs and Darcy isn't sure she wants to know which one. "I can't even. I don't know how to explain the change, because the only real change was the biological one, mild depression from not bonding with you, mild mania from your father being gone. But then there was Afghanistan and a really fucking smart man telling me I had everything and nothing, and I think I'm starting to understand what that means. Darce--"

"Shh," she hears herself say. "Just take a good, long nap, Tones. You need to heal, all right? I need you to be okay, and right now you aren't, so just... Sleep it off. I know you've got a healing factor, but you still just. Please sleep, all right?"

Tony grimaces, but he does turn to lie on his side, somehow completely avoiding the crazy amount of tubes sticking out of him, and goes to sleep. Darcy lets out a breath, leans back in her chair, tries not to notice how small and vulnerable he looks like this. Still, she hates seeing him this way, probably always will, because she needs him around, needs him invincible and invulnerable and forever young and all those fucking things, she fucking _needs_ him, and this little reminder of his mortality strikes her straight in the solar plexus. And as weeks of forced sparring sessions have taught her, a hit to the solar plexus is really fucking bad, and painful as all fuck, a thing to avoid at all costs. If she does find him a fucking date, she needs to make sure it's someone who can be on the field with him and is as fucking invested in his safety as she is. Not that, well. Finding a date might not even work. He's bonded. How fucking deep can he get in with someone else anyway? And fuck, she hates how tragic that is, hates the train wreck that's his life with a passion. She--

The door to the hospital room opens, breaking her out of her very uncomfortable train of thoughts. "Evening, Miss Lewis," Captain America says, dragging another chair over, and fuck, his tone alone is enough to make her feel ten years older than she is. Or yougner. Either way, not cool, Captain America, not cool at all.

"Evening, Mr. America," she returns, reaching out to take one of Tony's lax hands in her own, cradling it between her palms.

He winces. "That. That actually sounded real bad. Call me Steve?"

Darcy shrugs. "If you call me Darcy," she returns, not quite able to stay out of the frosty levels of interaction.

Another wince. "You don't seem too happy," he says.

She huffs. "Of course I'm not happy. _My_ Tony has been running himself ragged trying to keep the world in one piece while you played hide-and-go-seek with your amnesiac ex best friend. And now he's in the fucking hospital because you were halfway around the world rather than dealing with a home emergency, the way _you're supposed to_. Some fucking hero you are."

This time she's met by an actual flinch, and there's not one fucking bit of satisfaction in seeing it. "I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't have--"

"Yeah, no," Darcy says. "You really shouldn't. How's it feel to know you risked the world for one person?"

His Adam's apple bobs. "It's only Doom. He wouldn't end the world. He's still part of it."

"Your team, then," Darcy says. "You risked your team for one person. Aren't you supposed to be Captain America?"

Captain Ameri- Steve, _Steve_ , lets out a long sigh and runs strong fingers through his own previously oddly neat, blond hair. He has incredibly dark lashes for someone so... fair, or whatever you call that kind of coloring outside of cheap fantasy novels. "I'm sorry," he says. "I never meant to... I made the choice to take down S.H.I.E.L.D., and I still believe that was the right decision. I didn't stop to think how it would affect people like your father, though. And I didn't stop to think that..." He pauses, swallows. "I should've stayed and dealt with the aftermath. I should've realized there'd be a vacuum and that Tony would try to deal with it. I should've known that being so focused on Bucky would affect others too, and I'm sorry for whatever you and Tony had to go through because of my actions."

Darcy wishes she could be more gratified. She also kind of wishes he'd have put up more of a fight, though. Winning is so much better after an actual conflict. Not that it matters right now. What matters right at this moment is Tony, sleeping like an infant on a too-big bed, and when the hell have hospital beds ever been too fucking big for anyone ever anyway? "Don't you fucking do it again," she says.

Steve sucks in a sharp breath. "I promise," he says, and, oddly enough, she believes him.

***

Not two hours after Jane comes by to drag Darcy back to the living floors of the Tower by the ear and threaten food and shower and sleep, Tony signs himself out AMA, takes the elevator up and walks into the common floor under his own power. His face is still pale and battered, but for someone so wrecked just yesterday, he looks surprisingly good. Scarily good. He flashes her a grin. "Hey there, Mini-Me. Where is everyone?"

She shrugs. "The stooges are Barnes-sitting, or something. In the Hulk cage. Banner is down there too, checking his relative stability or some shit like that, I wasn't really listening. Thor's gone grocery shopping. I've got JARVIS watching him on security cams and putting together a video we can laugh at later. Hawkass... I don't even know, probably in the fucking vents somewhere or something. Jane's in the kitchen." She points her thumb over her shoulder. "Trying and failing to cook me something or other. Also." She frowns, wrinkles her nose deliberately. "I'm pretty sure Mini-Me is most commonly a word men use for their dicks, so..."

Tony flashes her a lopsided grin. "Only if it's 'mini'."

She rolls her eyes at him.

"Hey," he says. "Maybe we should head downstairs, see what Brucie and the stooges are up to. Take a look at Barnes with no fighting or shit going down. That beautiful arm of his might need maintenance. Plus, I probably owe him a few thank yous, and about a pack and a half of cigarettes."

Darcy grins. "You're just curious, aren't you?"

He shrugs, trying a little too hard to make it look casual, and if Darcy hadn't already wanted to see Barnes, she sure as fuck does now. What the hell is going on here? What's got Tony acting like this, all curious and subversive, like a kid who wants to see Santa but insists he doesn't believe he exists? Or, you know, something. Darcy sucks at metaphors. Languages were never really her main strength. Not that politics were either, really. "Is that a crime? Oh, well, if you'd rather stay here and wait for Foster to burn down the kitchen, be my guest."

She raises her hands, barely holding back a laugh. "Didn't say I wasn't coming," she says. "Think you're the only half-dead cat around?"

"Wow, Darce," he says. "That was positively vintage."

She harrumphs. "Don't you ever call me a hipster again."

He grins, wraps an arm around her shoulders and raises his free hand to ruffle her hair. She ducks away, punching him shoulder as she goes (gently, he just got out of medical, she does have a bit of compassion in her), but lets him wrap an arm around her again and lead her to the elevator. By the time it begins to descend, something has begun to churn in her stomach, something strange, something like anticipation, but not quite, tugging on her pack sense, making her jittery and nervous. If Tony's constant shifting is any indication, he's not any better off.

The elevator stops, doors sliding open, and they're in a corridor Darcy hasn't been in before. Honestly, it's not quite like anything she's ever seen in the Tower before. It's small and narrow, like there's not quite enough space for it but Tony decided it had to be there anyway. Tony clearly doesn't share her lack of familiarity with the place, striding down the hallway to the door at the end. "JARVIS," he says. "Open the door, would you. Sesame and all that crap."

The door slides open, but before they can even enter Capta - no, Steve, Steve is there, blocking their view, or at least hers. Darcy doesn't have a clue what Tony may or may not be able to see over that deliciously broad shoulder. And ugh, that thought suddenly feels wrong, and how the hell is she getting incestuous pack vibes from _Captain America_ all of a sudden? What even is her life? 

"Tony," Steve says. "What are you doing here? You can't be here. He's--" He stops, sucks in a deep breath. "He's so agitated, he's going to hurt himself. We can't have any more people here for him to have to deal with. He can't handle it." Well, thank you Captain Shithead. He isn't even pretending not to ignore her completely.

Tony sighs, leaning against the wall. "So, if he's so agitated you had to lock him in the Hulk cage, why are you keeping four people around him? I mean, yeah, I get that you are his link to the past, and probably wouldn't be able to get yourself to leave if you wanted to. Wilson, I guess, is a passable shrink, for someone willing to listen, maybe, probably not someone agitated. Now, Nat, I get. Nat can make anyone listen. But Bruce, c'mon, he's no help if he can't get close. So, basically, I'm of at least as much use as Bruce, and if he really is as worked up as you say, Nat's the only one who's going to make a difference. How did you catch him anyway?"

Steve blinks. "How did you even know we got him? Aren't you still supposed to be in medical? Tony, are you--"

Tony rolls his eyes. "Well, I'd have known sooner if I'd remembered to ask JARVIS, but after Darcy left I got a bit distracted with cat videos, so I'm still not entirely sure how you got him. And I did wait for Cho to leave before I signed myself out." He shrugs, completely unapologetic. "It was no biggie, Spangles. I'm all fine. I wasn't even bad enough to put in that cradle thingie. So just." He frowns. "How the hell did you get the Winter Soldier?"

Steve looks utterly thrown for long moments. Then he shakes his head. "We can talk in the hallway," he says, and begins to attempt to maneuver them out of the room.

"Wait," Widow shouts from somewhere within that whole unseen room of mystery place. "He isn't showing any adverse reactions to their presence, Cap. Just let them in. Whatever's happening right now, we want it to keep happening."

Steve looks back and forth between the two of them. There's a wrinkle between his eyebrows that Darcy's pretty sure wasn't present in any of the PR material she's seen. At least he stops trying to herd them away. "He was near catatonic after the fight," Steve says at last. "Was pretty easy to load him into a car and get him back to the Tower. I put him up in my guest room. Less than an hour later, JARVIS woke me, said Bucky was trying to break out. I called for backup, we managed to overwhelm him and get him down here." He gives a shrug that's more resigned than anything Darcy would've expected from him. "Beyond that, I don't know more than you do."

"Well, Cap," Tony says, "you better let me through. I want a look at that gorgeous arm. Please?" The face accompanying the last word makes him look all of five years old, which probably isn't very dignified on a forty-two-year-old man, but then again, when has Tony ever looked, let alone acted, his age?

Steve sighs and steps aside, letting them through. Darcy stays hot on Tony's heels as they make their way into the room. Which is not so much a room as a high tech cavern. Taking up at least two floors of its own, the space is a cage of glass (or glass-like substance) within a narrow room with windows probably concealing control booths on the next level. Every surface is chrome or control panel or glass (or glass-like substance). Within the cage is a figure she's starting to become all too familiar with. He's tall, and broad across the shoulders and chest, broad damn near anywhere. Well, except maybe the waist, but even that looks more solid and less tapered than Steve's, a hell of a lot more obviously powerful. His dark hair hangs limp and lank in his face, matted against too-pale skin. His metal arm gleams. But the most haunting thing about him is the eyes, slate grey with the barest hint of blue, nearly as expressive as Tony's, and they are broadcasting too much and somehow too little all at once for her to have a chance to pick up on it. Through the glass-or-whatever, she can't even pick up enough scent to read anything out of that. She doesn't have the first clue what the hell's going on here, and it's freaking her the fuck out.

Tony doesn't seem to be sharing even a bit of her freak-out. Rather, he's shouldering past Steve and making his way straight towards the glass cage. The Winter Soldier's eyes are tracking him step for step, everything beyond his eyes as still as death. By the time Tony comes within a few yards of the cage, the Winter Soldier moves, and with just a few, efficient steps, he's as close as the glass walls let him get, his flesh-and-blood hand pressed against the glass-or-whatever. Tony stops short, his harsh breath audible in the silent air of the room. His dark eyes are fixed on that hand, bigger, Darcy already knows, than his own, stronger and yet, somehow, in this position, even more vulnerable than Tony at his worst. 

Tony comes to a stop just a couple of feet from the glass, blinking. His Adam’s apple bobs on a swallow. His chest expands, then contracts. All the lines that should be on his face, given his actual age, are there, even if for just a moment. His lips part on a breath. He exhales. The Winter Soldier drops back, scrambling towards the back wall, eyes blinking even as his hands come up in front of him in what is so fucking clearly a defensive position anyone mistaking it for anything else would be a damn idiot. Tony takes a step back, then another and another, until he's all but running towards Darcy, one hand coming up to rub at his neck. "On second thought," he says as he passes her. "I could really use some burnt casserole, and some sleep."

Darcy blinks at the utter weirdness of that whole exchange, casts a glance over her shoulder. Then she follows Tony out, and tries not to feel the distress of the pack bond because, fuck, part of her, something primal and unquantifiable, is telling her that's not all Tony, not this time.

"JARVIS," Tony says as they enter the elevator all over again. "Please order some proper food, and put out the fire Dr. Foster must've set in the kitchen by now." His voice is tight and still somehow lost all at once.

"What just happened?" Darcy asks, and she knows she should be a hell of a lot more delicate about it, but that's one thing she's never known how to do.

Tony meets her eyes for a brief moment, and his are enormous and vulnerable and so confused it hurts to look at them. "I don't know," he says. "I don't fucking know." They've never been so dark before, his eyes, never been so lost or so frightened, not that she's seen, and she hates it, fucking wishes she could do something to bring back his easy grin and (shaky) self-confidence. He is her Tony, and she never wants to see him like this. Fuck all, this is almost worse than seeing him in the med bay.

"It's going to be all right, you know," she says, and she has no idea where the hell that even comes from. "It's going to be fine. I promise." Even so, it's all she can do to keep him halfway present through the meal that's halfway Jane's best effort and halfway takeaway, and when she pulls Tony down the hall and tucks him in, he looks so absurdly small in his enormous bed she can't do anything other than climb in with him and wrap her arms around him, trying her best to keep him safe at least for as long as he's capable of sleeping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone for kudos, bookmarks, subscriptions and especially comments. They mean the world to me. However, I am in the middle of changing computers and bringing my files over with me, so I might be a bit slow in updating and responding. Sorry about that, hopefully the wait won't be too long. I still promise to answer every single comment I get.
> 
> Also, I am sorry to anyone who's Jewish who might find the opening sentence of this chapter offensive. A) it plays more on the literal meaning of the words than the religious ones and B) even if you can't see past that, absolutely no offense is meant. I come from a culture where nothing's off limits. I understand it's not like that for everyone everywhere, but please know that I mean no offense, I only mean to produce laughs.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably tell you all that when I get towards the end of a project, I tend to slow down and posting definitely takes longer. Not exactly sure why, but for some reason, that's how it goes, much of the time. There should be about one chapter to go of this story, and hopefully it should be up in the foreseeable future, though I can't make promises about the specific time frame.
> 
> Thanks so much to Potrix for the beta. I should add that I love the Planet of the Apes; Darcy just chooses not to watch it because she thinks it might be confusing for the rest of her audience.

"JARVIS," Darcy says. "What do we have on the Winter Soldier? Anything leaked from S.H.I.E.L.D., anything you can hack from anywhere else. Just..." She takes a deep breath. "Something isn't right here, and I need to know what and just. Anything you can bring up for me, please?" Honestly, she doesn't know what the hell she's doing, what nudge of her own mind she's chasing this time. She just knows, that, fuck, she can't get the image of that big hand pressed against the something-that-looks-like-glass off her mind, can't stop trying to match all the pieces together. Sure, the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes, and in some ways it would make sense for him to look out for Howard Stark's son and granddaughter. Except by all accounts Bucky Barnes never actually liked Howard all that much, definitely not enough to continuously play bodyguard for her and Tony without any further explanation. And besides, even a self-appointed bodyguard - outside the damn movie - would never react to a charge the way Bucky Barnes reacted to Tony Stark.

"S.H.I.E.L.D. files have no intelligence on James Barnes beyond what is commonly known," JARVIS says. "However, after several weeks of analyzing the data, I believe HYDRA rode S.H.I.E.L.D.'s coattails, like a parasite if you will, or the B-side of an old record. These carry the barest data of the Winter Soldier mission files."

Darcy swallows, not sure at all that she wants to proceed with this. She's already so prepared to hate, so prepared to judge, to-- She'd kill anyone for Tony, she knows this already, and sure, he might be a superhero and all, but to her he's still just Tony and fuck, anything she could do to make his suffering less, she won't hesitate about for a second. Except... What if he wasn't the only one completely turned around, the only one scared out of his mind and-- She cuts herself off. She needs confirmation before she lets her mind go down this road. "Give them to me, Little Bro."

"Miss Lewis," JARVIS says. "I do believe it would be best if you never address me like that again."

Darcy rolls her eyes, but despite everything that's going on, she's fucking smiling. "Sure thing, JAY," she says.

"This file," JARVIS says, "seems particularly relevant to this conundrum."

A holo-screen bleeds into life in front of her, fairly tame by the standards of Tony's tech, all text and no images. _21st December, 1988_ , it says. _The Asset was deployed to terminate the Stark family. 2/3 success._ Darcy sucks in a sharp breath, reads on as the clinical notes detail how the Winter Soldier obliterated Howard Stark and María Carbonell, how he went after the third target and failed, ensnared by his alpha nature. There are long files, backs and forths between any number of HYDRA high-ups who debate whether the Winter Soldier should be kept alive, whether Tony Stark should be kept alive (whether the usefulness of his existence would work as a last contingency to keep at bay any threat from the Assest, and whether that outweighed the risk of keeping him alive). There are long notes about Project: Insight, how it was supposed to kill Tony and how Barnes wasn't supposed to survive the battle that followed. Long, awful lists of notes and facts and horrible theories, and as much as Darcy might not want it, here is the answer to the question she's never quite dared ask since learning the truth about Tony: who is her father?

Darcy swallows down her fear, keeps the panic at bay. So, the Winter Soldier is a weird HYDRA/Red Room collaboration project, brain washed beyond recognition, the world's foremost assassin for as long as most people in the world have been alive. And he was made to assassinate the Stark family - Darcy would figure out the actual reasons later; right now she is mostly concerned about facts. He took out Howard Stark and María Carbonell in one go, and went after Tony only to find out that Tony was a bitch in the grips of his first heat, and according to HYDRA, that had been enough for the Winter Soldier to lose his cool. Rather than assassinate Tony, he'd fucked him and mated with him, all alpha dog in a near feral rut style. Instead of assassinating him. And he'd returned to HYDRA with a job half-done, the only one to date, according to JARVIS. Ever since, Tony has been used against him, the weakness to probe at when all else failed, the nameless, faceless mate Barnes could sense but not remember, whose death was unthinkable. And fuck. This is the bio parent she's thought unsafe? Yeah, sure, he is, but not at all in the way she's expected. "Shut down the files, JARVIS," she says. She needs a moment to fucking think.

It's all, well, it's not clear, not by a long stretch, but she's beginning to see the full picture. Barnes was captured and brainwashed by either HYDRA or HYDRA's Soviet allies, the papers aren't really clear on that point. For years, he was brainwashed into being the perfect assassin, without memory or identity or emotion, a weapon before he was a human being. He was given the assignment of killing the Starks. Managed to kill Howard and María, and made it look like an accident. And then he was supposed to finish it off with Tony. Except Tony messed up everyone's plans, simply by being a bitch in heat. Oh, Darcy's sure there's more to it than that. Like HYDRA not entirely thinking their plan through before sending an alpha out to kill an alpha and then that alpha's alpha child. Well, fuck, that's a lot of alpha crammed into one sentence, but Darcy knows the stories, has heard so much about alpha culture from her parents she's probably on par with several experts. Having killed María Carbonell would've only made Barnes's alpha instincts that much sharper, right of first challenge or whatever the hell it's called and all that. The essential points are that by turning himself bitch, Tony unwittingly saved his own life. And maybe Barnes isn't the utter creeper she's been imagining her bio father as. Maybe he's as much a victim as Tony, of different circumstances, maybe, but still a victim. She tries to imagine it, decades of torture and brainwashing, being used as a weapon for a cause you don't believe in. She can't. She can't even begin to comprehend it, let alone the past twenty-five years where the bond, the only human part left of him, has been used to keep him under even tighter control. She lets out a breath, conflicted and sad and so, so confused, doesn't have a clue what to think, let alone what's going to happen now.

She should tell Tony what she's found out. He deserves to know. Except... Except that aside from the barest facts she still doesn't know anything. She doesn't know who Barnes is underneath the conditioning of the Winter Soldier. Neither does Tony. Shouldn't she at least, fuck, give him some kind of a chance first? See what kind of person he can be before she gives Tony cause to hate him? They're bound together, Tony and Bucky, all three of them, even, and that's clearly been a far more present fact in Barnes's life than in Tony's, and she... Shit, she isn't sure she can fracture that further when he's at least as damaged as Tony is and, fuck, she isn't sure her thoughts are even making sense anymore, or whether they're just running in nonsensical circles. She'll keep this to herself for now, get just a bit more data on the whole situation. She can make the choice to tell once she has more of a clue about what kind of person Barnes turns out to be. "Can you keep this between the two of us for now, JAY?" she asks.

After a beat, JARVIS speaks up in his resigned tone of voice, "Yes, Miss. That might turn out to be in Sir's best interest."

Darcy forces a smile onto her face. "Thanks, JAY."

***

Darcy waits a couple of days before she even really contemplates heading back down to the floor where Barnes's being kept. Not so much because she is scared to face him - though she's woman enough to admit that that prospect does make her kind of nervous now that she knows what she knows. Mostly, really, it's because of how long it takes for everyone to calm the fuck down, for her to see Wilson and Banner and Widow in the common areas more often, and then even Steve, even though the painfully resigned look on his face isn't exactly something she likes being faced with. She only makes her move once she's fairly certain Barnes has got to be the only one there. Then she heads out to the nearest Seven-Eleven, buys a couple of packs of cigarettes and two lighters and heads for the Hulk containment floor.

Barnes is sitting quite calmly against the glass-like wall of his cage, long legs stretched out in front of him, arms lax at his sides. He looks exhausted, his hair somehow even lanker than before, eyes damn near sunken into a face that could be fucking handsome as hell if he bothered making an effort. He barely reacts to her presence, just keeps staring off into nothingness, his eyes frighteningly empty.

Darcy swallows down her misgivings, sucks in a sharp breath. "Hey, Buckaroo," she says. "I come bearing gifts. Realized I kind of owe you a smoke or two, if you're interested."

He doesn't react except to shift the tiniest bit. His metal arm has clearly taken a beating. Nothing Tony can't fix up given a few hours in the workshop, but it looks like a hindrance right now. And, quite possibly, a literal pain.

"JARVIS, any way to get stuff in there for him?" she asks. "And there's ventilation inside the terrarium, right?"

"Certainly, Miss," JARVIS says. "To both your questions." He proceeds to explain how she should go about locating the food hatch, how to activate it and reset the security. She follows his instructions and watches as a pack of cigarettes and a lighter travel from her side of the cage to Barnes's. He still isn't reacting. Darcy shrugs off her unease, opens her own pack and lights one up.

"C'mon, Barnes," she says. "I'm a party smoker. Hate to smoke alone, especially without alcohol. So just, yeah, grab a fag, or whatever you called them back in nineteen-whatever-the-hell, and make me feel a bit less lonely and pathetic, would you?"

Barnes's eyes seem to focus the tiniest bit at that, or she's letting wishful thinking get the best of her. He still doesn't move so much as a muscle, but his eyes seem to be following her now, tracking her movements as she sits down, leaning her back against the chrome wall, and takes a deep drag of her cigarette.

"So," she says. "This has got to be kind of overwhelming. Scary. You're in the future, in what is probably the world's most secure prison cell, and you've got strangers coming to eyeball you every hour of every fucking day. Can't say I'd enjoy that all that much either."

He doesn't say anything, but he's inching closer, bit by bit, to the cigarettes she gave him. Finally, he lights one up and scrambles back to his position against the wall, inhaling deeply before letting out a thick lungful of smoke.

"Yeah," Darcy says. "Cap says they don't taste the way they used to, back in the forties. Not sure if the serum messed with his sense of taste, or if they really did change things up. Not that you're going to be much of a help. You've got the HYDRA version of the serum messing you around just as much, don't you?"

He doesn't answer, simply takes another drag of his cigarette.

"Listen," she says. "It's got to suck being locked up in there, I can't even imagine. Just, I'm not trying to psycho-analyze you or any of that bullshit, or trying to make you be Bucky Barnes. I just know you're in a shitty situation. Anything you need, tell me. I'll do my best to get it for you."

Barnes looks straight at her at those words, and his eyes are piercing straight through her for long moments. Then the intensity is replaced by longing and anguish and too many other feelings to keep up with. His broad shoulders slump. He takes another drag of the cigarette, and Darcy kind of wants to push him, force him to admit he wants his mate, but that's not going to be the best way to deal with this, she thinks. She's not sure he's one bit more ready for Tony than vice versa. Not sure he's properly Bucky Barnes yet at all. And the Winter Soldier isn't who she wants to free here, not at all.

"How much do you remember?" she asks.

For several long moments, where all either one of them does is smoke up their cigarettes and light another one up, Darcy's near certain he's not going to answer. Then he gives a slow, economical shrug. "I remember my ma," he says. "I think. And my sisters. And that little punk I had to keep pullin' outta trouble. I remember..." He pauses, takes another drag of his cigarette. "Pain, and a chair and k--" He stops again, swallows deeply. "Killin' people. And I remember brown eyes, and warmth, and home." He huffs out something she thinks is probably supposed to be a laugh. "I probably don't even have a mate," he says. "Probably just my handlers messin' with me, tryin' to get another thing to hold over my head. I don't even remember..." He trails off, and seems to close back off, focusing all of his attention down onto his half-smoked cigarette. He doesn't say anything else.

"I don't really think a bond's something you can fake for someone," Darcy offers at last. "I mean, it's not. I mean, I don't know, I haven't felt it, but it's supposed to be visceral. It's unbreakable, and you feel it every moment of every day, right? Especially the dog." She pauses, bites her lip briefly in thought before letting it plop back out from between her teeth. "You're remembering your mom and your sisters, which means you're not all HYDRA programming at this point in time. Do you still feel the bond?"

He blows out another lungful of smoke. "Yes," he says.

She gives a shrug, careful to keep it casual. "Then the bond's probably real too. I mean, you can't have one thing be real and dismiss the rest, right? So you do have a bonded out there. Isn't that worth getting yourself together over?"

The laugh Barnes lets out has not one whit of humor to it. It's dry and bitter and manages to turn damn near hysterical before he gets it back under control. "Who cares what I got out there?" he asks. "Who'd want anythin' to do with me? Who the fuck would actually want me near them, in their fuckin' life? I'm a wreck. I'm a fuckin' weapon. I don't know how to be anything else." His eyes are confused even as his voice rises, as though he can't understand why he's telling her this. Her pack senses are screaming his distress out at her. She keeps herself carefully calm. The last thing she needs right now is to flood his system with more negative feelings, and he might not realize there's a connection yet, but that doesn't mean it won't impact him.

She has no idea what to tell him, how to convince him there's still someone out there for him. She can't tell him about Tony, about his utter vulnerability and the loneliness she suspects has dominated his life for decades, if not forever. She can't break that kind of confidence. So what the fuck is she supposed to say to him anyway? She bites her lip, uncertain, then, "Do you want to watch a movie? JARVIS, can we even watch a movie down here?"

"Certainly, Miss," JARVIS says. "What would you like me to queue up?"

Barnes blinks, then shrugs. "Sure," he says. "I could use some popcorn and a date, but." Another shrug, and by the look of him, anything that can help him pass the time and not have to think is welcome at this point.

"I can get you the popcorn, at least," she says. "Can't I, JARVIS?"

"I'm prodding the closest Avenger to pop a few packs in the microwave and send them down through the food elevator, Miss," JARVIS assures her.

Darcy nods, grateful. Then, "What to watch, what to watch? Not Star Wars, the 'Luke, I'm your father' scene will be awkward as fuck--"

"Wait," Barnes says. "What?"

"--And we're both too old for Disney anyway," Darcy continues, deliberately picking up on Tony's bad conversational habits. "Planet of the Apes sucks because time space stuff. I don't do black and white movies. Or rom coms. Or superhero movies. And 2001: A Space Odyssey will make you scared of AIs. As will The Terminator. JARVIS, any suggestions here, help your big sister out, will you?"

"Only if you never refer to yourself as such again, Miss," says JARVIS.

"Promise," she says, though it's probably one she won't be able to keep. It might not be easy to shake JARVIS, but this is still the perfect ammunition to tease the hell out of Tony in the right situation.

"By my understanding," JARVIS says, " _The Sound of Music_ is a modern classic that Sergeant Barnes still has enough cultural references to understand. Would you like me to play it? Also, Agent Barton says that both he and the popped corn will arrive in five minutes."

Darcy groans. "Can you dissuade Hawkass? Convince him that Tony has some new arrows almost ready for him that just need his final input to be put into production or something? Get us the popcorn, though, and sure, play us _The Sound of Music_. I always liked Maria in it."

Barnes blinks at her, and then at the ceiling, back and forth in turns, then seems to shrug it off, as though he's used to shit he doesn't understand happening to him, which Darcy kind of really hates. What happened to Tony was bad enough. Knowing that both her bio parents are fucked up, messed up victims of circumstance doesn't sit right with her. She really fucking hopes their history isn't some kind of portend of what her own life's got in store for her. "Sure," he finally says, and then mutters something to himself in Russian, but that's fine, she reminds herself. He isn't being aggressive with her, and he isn't being catatonic either. Anything between those extremes has to be a positive at this point.

JARVIS projects the film onto the wall in front of them, Maria's old-fashioned Broadway vibrato immediately flooding the room. Still, Darcy finds herself side-eying Bucky. "Do you cook?" she asks.

He doesn't look away from the movie that's apparently utterly fascinating to him. "Sure," he says, pretty absentminded. "Oldest of four, best friends with _Stevie Rogers_ , what do you think?"

"That you need to learn how to use garlic and chili," Darcy mutters under her breath, too soft to be heard. And fuck, this is not what she's expected at all. She hasn't been expecting to be able to talk to him after it seems damn near everyone's given up on him, hasn't expected him to be this pleasant or controlled or open, hasn't expected, for even a moment, that he might actually be a solution to the whole lonely-Tony problem she's been trying to handle. He seems a lot closer to being safe out of the Hulk cage than she's expected, anyway, so that's good at least. Even if she's still not quite certain about pimping her Tony out to him, even if he should probably be _her_ Bucky too. Ugh, when the hell did her life get this fucking confusing anyway? Can't a girl just have some nice, normal bio parents that look more than five years her senior? Is that really so much to ask?

There is a beep as a panel in the wall opens to reveal three paper bags of freshly popped corn. Darcy gets up to retrieve them, tosses two of them into Barnes's food hatch and keeps the last one for herself before settling down to watch the mad shenanigans of the Von Trapp family. God, she hasn't watched this flick since she was about ten, and these days sixteen-going-on-seventeen seems ridiculously young and wrong and just... well, generally fucking ridiculous, right up until she remembers that's the age Tony was when... She buries the thought deep with a grimace, shoots a look at Barnes out the corner of her eye.

He's utterly engrossed, looking at the movie like it's a fucking masterpiece, like it's the most interesting thing he's ever seen, and she kind of wants to ask him what sucks him in, which character he feels closest to, but she bites it back. If she can drum up some kind of easy, casual interaction with the Winter Soldier, that will probably be in everyone's best interest, but she can't do that if she keeps giving him the third degree. At least he's still present enough to keep eating his popcorn.

She returns again the next day, which is how the Julie-whatever marathon starts. They watch Mary Poppins, despite her Disney reservations, and some other stuff she doesn't even know, and then the Princess Diaries, which are fucking goofy and stupid, and yet she'd still swear Barnes is damn near cooing at the characters, which, yeah, shit, she hasn't counted on him being this big a dork. Somehow, that just makes him seem that much more perfect. You need to be a fucking utter dork, and a geek to boot, to have any kind of a chance of keeping up with Tony. And apparently Barnes is even worse than Darcy. She's not entirely sure whether this is good or bad. In the end, she pushes the thoughts of Tony away. She has a right to this, to these hours and movies and strange, distant bonding. Barnes is her fucking bio dad. No one in the world would ever blame her for hogging him for a little while, taking these few days to learn how to feel comfortable in his presence, even if there is still a glass-like cage between them. Either way, she has a right to this. She's exercising it. Which is exactly what she's going to say if anyone ever realizes just how much time she's spending down here.

Not that she stops spending time with Tony. Soon as the marathon's over, she walks straight back down to the 'shop to see what he's doing, check that he's eaten (he hasn't, the fucking idiot), serve him up a sandwich or two and hand him his tools when his bots are too slow. Tony's distracted, most of the time, and she's kind of understanding what he means when he says he'd suck as a father, not that he's ever said that in as many words. Still, it's been pretty heavily implied. It's not that he's not kind or loving or supportive, he's all of that and more, but he's prone to distance. Not so much, she thinks, because he wants to be, as because his brain is a strange, foreign, exotic place he can't always pull himself out of. And even as part of her wishes she'd inherited his genius, she's kind of glad she hasn't, because his genius comes with obsessive compulsive behaviors and distance and a tendency to lose himself so completely he has no clue about time or place, which, yeah, not cool. Still, it's kind of unfair of the universe to have given her neither Tony's genius nor all that much of Bucky's super strength. Sure, she can give a good punch, but no way she's going to hold her own against a real threat.

Somehow, strangely, Maria forges her way back into her thoughts, and Darcy can't help but imagine her hypothetical baby sister as the best of both of them, Tony's wide, expressive, beautiful eyes, Bucky's strong jaw and high cheekbones, Tony's motor mouth and perfect messy hair, Bucky's strength and stamina and recovery, Tony's brain and curiosity. And she stops herself right there because, fuck, perfect human being, and she's never imagined her imaginary little sister to be that before. Fucking talk about shoes no one would ever in a million years be able to fill.

"This is swell," Barnes says by the end of their third movie marathon. They've moved on from Julie-what-the-hell-ever to fucking Disney, and Darcy will never live this down if anyone ever finds out. "I really liked Belle, and the colors they used were absolutely amazin'."

Darcy groans, because, fuck, last thing she needs is to turn fifty percent of her birth parents into an utter Disney fan. She's going to find herself in Disney World one of these days, and it's going to be embarrassing beyond words, especially with all of them hitting right in the middle of the not-young-enough-not-old-enough demographic. With no actual kids around, it's going to be downright humiliating. "Personally, I kind of like the mini-Teapot," she says. "And Lumiere. Lumiere rocks."

Barnes snorts. "Definitely a step up from those damn bullies trying to get at Belle. Stevie woulda--" He stops, frowns, and his whole fucking face scrunches up with it. "I don't--" He stops, swallows. "I don't actually know what Steve woulda done. What the hell am I sayin'. I--" Another swallow, sharp enough that his Adam's apple jumps with it. "Who the hell is Steve?"

Darcy pauses a moment, forces herself to (quickly) digest all the Bucky Barnes and Captain America trivia she's ever known. "Well," she says. "There was a comic, which apparently got all sorts of stuff wrong and wrote you into two separate characters. But never mind that. Steve..." She frowns, tries to categorize every damn thing she knows about Captain America. "He was your best friend growing up. He was always sick, and always getting into fights, so you probably spent all your formative years trying to keep him safe and out of trouble. Then the Second World War hit, and you were immediately pulled into the army, officer's training and everything. Sent overseas. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Steve got turned into Captain America. You and most of the rest of your company were taken as prisoners of war and made to work for HYDRA, if I remember correctly. You were experimented on, which is probably when you got your first few doses of the HYDRA super soldier serum. Cap broke you out, and then there were the Howling Commandoes for a while, which ended in you taking a jump off the bad end of a speeding train, and then you were somehow made into the Winter Soldier." She cringes. "That's not what you were asking at all. Sorry about that. Er, what else do you want to know, aside from the Stevie-is-your-childhood-friend-who-turned-into-Cap-and-temporarily-saved-you-from-HYDRA bit?"

"Mate," Barnes all but groans. "Do you know my mate?"

Darcy pauses, trying to figure out a way to answer that honestly without going past the bonds of confidence. "He's strong," she says. "And so damn fragile. And yeah, he's male. I know you probably didn't go for that kind of thing back in the forties, but--" She shrugs. "He's the most brilliant man I know, but he's utterly incapable of looking after himself, inside and outside of battle. He's a soldier and a civilian rolled up into one. He's--" She stops herself, sucks in a deep breath. "You're going to have your hands full."

Barnes flashes her a toothy grin. "Not sure I'd have wanted it any other way," he says.

Darcy doesn't return the next day, leaves it to the powers-that-be to declare him suited or unsuited for freedom. Still, she's not surprised when he shows up in the common areas a couple of days later, is even less surprised about the fact that Tony has him instantly whipped, without even trying. Barnes seems to be constantly cooking, Irish stews laced with garlic and chili as per her instructions. They're either at a slow boil on the common floor stove or being plated and brought down to Tony in the workshop. Bucky's arm's bothering him, she can tell that much, but he never complains, seems to get on just fine, and Tony doesn't seem to catch on until she tells him, after which the two of them spend hours together in the workshop every day.

She walks down one night and is met by Tony's trademark science babble and Bucky staring at him, wide-eyed, like he's something incredible, something to be cherished. And that is when, for the first time, Darcy decides she really fucking likes this guy, like maybe he isn't just the shackle around Tony's ankle, but something valuable to their whole fucked up series of calculations of a makeshift family. Barnes doesn't mind experiments on his arm, so long as Tony's the one running them. He doesn't mind psych evals, so long as Tony's there, and Tony _is_ , for no reason that adds up to anyone except for Darcy. She's pretty sure Bucky knows but refuses to push and that Tony's completely clueless, even if he is better fed and watered than he's probably been his whole adult life.

She's not sure what makes her do it, in the end. Sure, she wants the assholes to get over themselves and get together, but there are better ways of accomplishing that. In the end, perhaps she wants Maria more desperately than she's ever admitted to herself. That's the best explanation she can cook up for her own mind, anyway, when she sneaks into Tony's penthouse and into his bathroom and his drug cabinet. She's still scrabbling for excuses when she empties out his stash of suppression hormones and trades them in for utterly harmless multivitamins. She sneaks back out, and admits to herself that she really doesn't have anything like an excuse. She just has... She has a wish that's burnt through her for most of her life, and she has the newfound hope that she can bring Tony and Bucky out of this phase where all they do is constantly dance around one another. She loves the life she's had. She loves the parents she grew up with, but she can't help but wish some other kid will get to have the parents she never did. And sure, Tony in and of himself might not be the best father, too absent and easily distracted, but there's Bucky here to balance him out, Bucky, whose immediate focus might be less intense but is so much more constant, soft in a way Tony doesn't know how to be, that she still can't believe Bucky has in him after everything he's been through either.

It's wrong, she knows, to make these kinds of decisions on other people's behalves. But left to their own devices, they'll probably spend the next couple of centuries, or however long the serum is going to keep the pair of them alive, awkwardly dancing around each other, Tony oblivious while Bucky pines away. And Bucky is pining. It doesn't take a genius to see that. In the beginning, all his eyes held when he looked at Tony was awe and wonder, but these days it's painful longing, and a hesitance so heartbreaking Darcy kind of wants to punch him for getting her right in the feels. 

Of course, she supposes the normal kind of thing would be to sit them down, together or separately, and talk to them. Or, you know, let Tony _know_ that Bucky's his mate. But seriously, by now she knows them well enough to know that would just increase the awkward, make them dance around each other even more. No one wants that, she's pretty sure. So, in some ways, she's pretty sure she's doing them a favor. Or something. Fuck, she really should head back up, change the contents of that bottle all over again and fall to her knees and beg Tony's forgiveness. But. Something stops her. The same instinct that made her do this in the first place, maybe, and it is fucking instinctive whatever her more conscious motivations might be.

It takes two days before anything's evident on him. It's his scent, and it's so faint at first as to be barely something even she can pick up. Whatever super expensive designer drug suppressant he's been on, though, it must've somehow interacted with the body washes and whatever else he's been using to cloak his natural scent, because both things start breaking down. She can actually smell the bitch on him, now, while the scent of dog is getting fainter, almost by the minute. Bucky, she's pretty sure, catches up on it the next day, eyes going slightly darker when he looks at Tony, all the more adoring, and he's so fucking constantly attentive she can't believe no one else has picked up on it yet. A day later, the Widow notices, or at least Darcy thinks she does; damn near impossible to tell with the Black Widow. But she does blink at Tony, wrinkling her nose as she sucks in a deep breath before proceeding to look at Tony like he's a very interesting specimen she'd very much like to dissect, never mind she's not part of the science team. That look, more than anything, makes Darcy sneak all the way back up into the penthouse to switch the drugs back out. She changes her mind again before going through with it. Barton's next, and far less subtle than the rest of them. He breathes in deeply and obviously at an accidental team breakfast. "Fuck, Stark, get it on with a bitch last night? Hope you used protection."

Bucky seems to barely bite back a small growl at that.

Tony just blinks in confusion.

Darcy tries to keep from broadcasting her guilt all over the place. She's pretty sure she feels Widow's eyes like a heavy weight on her shoulders anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all the kudos, bookmarks and subscriptions, and especially for the comments. Means the world, truly.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading. I appreciate every kudo, subscription, bookmark and comment more than you'll know. And I do realise that this is a gen story that Darcy&Tony have completely taken over, but hopefully that works even half as much for some people out there as it does for me. Hopefully you enjoyed, or at least got a few cheap giggles out of it. Talk to you soon.
> 
> PS, comment answers should be forthcoming pretty soon.


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